One bee has cloned itself millions of times over the past three decades

Bee genetics are wild. When I was a beekeeper we learned that queens lay two types of eggs - normal fertilized eggs, which will hatch into females and grow into workers if fed pollen, and queens if fed royal jelly, and unfertilized eggs, which hatch into males (stingless bees called drones) who will fly off and mate with the queens of other hives in spring. [1] At the time I had never heard of unfertilized eggs hatching, and the implication was that by creating male clones of themselves (haploid offspring, [4] not exact clones), queen bees are directly mating with the queens of other hives.

This information applies to the Italian honeybee subspecies kept in captivity (Apis mellifera ligustica) - the OP's article is about the african lowland honeybee (Apis mellifera scutella). The different honeybee subspecies are interesting: italian bees are nonaggressive, russian bees are hardy, etc.[2]

There's nothing special about workers having offspring either. When a honeybee queen gets old or weak, brood pheremones stop being able to suppress worker reproduction (worker policing fails [3]), and there are workers running around laying eggs in brood cells. Because workers have never mated with a drone, all their eggs are unfertilized and therefore hatch into drones [5]. This south african subspecies with a self-cloning female worker is really something unusual and unexpected, since those females should only be able to lay haploid eggs.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drone_(bee)

[2] https://www.perfectbee.com/learn-about-bees/the-science-of-b...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worker_policing

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haplodiploidy

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laying_worker_bee

if people like this, there is an interesting podcast on lyfe and life. [0] Apparently, the people who do research to artificial life, where they create things in silico and try to make life evolve from them, constantly run into a similar problem. By the time one or two hierarchies of organization have formed, progress halts as it succumbs to parasitic behaviour. Afaik it is still a poorly understood phenomenon, and even the bee society doesn't look immune.

I wonder how we ever got here with all these parasites.

[0] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Xs1K46AUK3M

So this is cancer analog for eusocial insects?

This is not sustainable for the clone bees right?

Eventually a disease will evolve to target these bees or the victim bees themselves will evolve some countermeasure. At that point since they are all clones they cannot evolve a defense and will be wiped out.

Very interesting. Could this be the full explanation for the mysterious bee hive collapse phenomenon that's been making the news for several years?

Not sure why but the HN title of the article sounds like a sci-fi thriller :)

Article doesn't really make clear how this differs from parthenogenesis in other species. Is this unheard of in bees or in any species?

Wow, bees nest upkeep, is a bit similar to people and their goverments.

I wonder how much of our society is directed by pheromones and dna mutations.

Agent Sbeeth

Private equity for honey bees

The real world Clone Wars

Interesting... my friend and I were just talking about racialized inbreeding in people, the sort of thing people do (consciously or otherwise) to give their offspring social privilege in some racial dominance hierarchy. It strikes me as similar in some sense. Trading off long term genetic diversity for relatively temporary gain to you and your own offspring.