The male Bear Andrena. Andrena obscuripennis. All bee species have males and females. Male bees are different from humans in that they are haploid not diploid (it would appear there are other differences, but those are not the interest at hand). Functionally that means that they are produced sans sexual reproduction and any female (bumble bee workers too!) can just pump out and egg and it will become a male (I presume this means that all that molecular material from said female is basically copied over to the male). While this is standard Hymenoptera dogma, what I can't seem to find out is why then do males often look so different from females? Often quite radically so. How does having only your Mom's chromosomes make you (the boy bee) look like a boy bee? Having these musings floating around makes me wonder if the world would be a better place if human males were haploid instead of diploid, did no real work to support a family, drank nectar all day, and whose sole purpose was to mate? Private note to the Bee Lab's dear Techniterns, no one filled out the Bee Picture log so I can't tell who took this picture.