I remember skimming a few weeks ago about bees, but I've lost the exact article (I'll google it later). I think the article touched on bees having more than 2 sexes and something about bees being more genetically related to their sisters than their kids. If this is true, how can this happen?
No idea about the sex thing, but there’s someone on tumblr claiming that because worker bees don’t reproduce, they’re not female. I wonder if that person ever heard about birth control, because worker bees are functionally very much female, they’re just not sexually matured. Well, most of them.If you remove the queen bee, there’s significantly more of them.
As for the genetic thing, I’d like the article on that. worker bees usually don’t breed and if they do (see above) they usually lay eggs that result in haploid drones. And for the ‘closer to their sisters’ that’s um… a queen bee mates with several drones so there’s already some variation among the sister worker bees of a hive. However, i think I know where this is coming from, but it may be more correct to say that the full-sister bees are closer related than sister animals in other species. Here’s why:
The drone is haploid, so all he sperm it produces will be identical. Meaning that from the male end of reproduction there’s no variation and any resulting offspring will always have the same 50% genetics from the drone. The female is diploid so there’s variation there. So basically instead of picking random chromosomes out of two complete sets, you’re only picking randomly out of one set, and the other set is fixed and cannot be changed. This result in a higher degree of ‘relatedness’ between full sisters.
However, as mentioned a queen mates with several drones before forming a hive, so within the hive it’s possible to have several ‘strains’ of half-sisters which would again not be that closely related to the other strains, so saying that bees are always closely related to their sisters is a bit of an oversimplification.
