In honey bee colonies , reproduction is ordinarily a tightly controlled affair . The queens mate within the first few sidereal day of life , before drop the next few years using the stored spermatozoan to fertilize nut and produce worker , who forgo procreation for the trade good of the hive . But in one isolated universe of westerly honey bees ( Apis mellifera ) in South Africa , the worker dosomething a little dissimilar : They manage to procreate without male .
“ The doubtfulness of why this population of honey bee in South Africa has evolved to regurgitate asexually is still a mystery,”explainsMatthew Webster , who co - authored the paper publish inPLOS Geneticslooking into this unique subspecies , theCape honey bee(Apis mellifera capensis ) . “ This study will aid us to understand how factor control biological operation like prison cell division and behavior . ”
The researcher decided to grow to DNA to hunt for clues , by sequencing the intact genome of the Cape honey bee and then comparing it to those of100 other western honey beesubspecies . What they come up was not that surprising : On the whole , the genome of all the race were fairly like . But there were some cardinal differences when looking at a few specific region of the genome .
They found multiple gene related to the bees ' societal parasitism , let in ones that controlled their hormonal signaling , which may cause the doer bees ' ovaries to activate , and others that may be involved in allow two girl cell to fuse to raise the diploid eggs they lie . Not only that , but there may be others demand in produce pheromones that cloak the eggs from other bees .
mantle beloved bees are a unique subspecies among honey bees . In normal honey bee colonies , the queen can lay eggs that are unfertilized , meaning they arehaploid(containing only one readiness of chromosome ) , which develop into male drones . The Cape bees , however , turn this on its head . Some of the workers in the colony , not just the queen , can lay eggs and rather than these being haploid they arediploid , meaning that they contain two sets of chromosomes as if they have been fertilized .
This uncommon , but not wholly unusual , form of replication also help in another scene of the Cape honey bee ’s demeanor . Sometimes the female proletarian bees will go away their original settlement and seek out new hives of dear bees . Sneaking in , they will lay their own diploid bollock within the new colony , which will then hatch and fee off the love storehouse . Known as “ societal parasitism ” , the Cape bees can destroy many colonies of beloved bee this way , yet how they have managed to develop this unusual method acting of reproduction and behavior has so far been a complete mystery story .
