Date: June 7, 2016
Source: Uppsala Universitet
An isolated population of
honeybees, the Cape bees, living in South Africa has evolved a strategy to
reproduce without males. A research team from Uppsala University has sequenced
the entire genomes of a sample of Cape bees and compared them with other
populations of honeybees to find out the genetic mechanisms behind their
asexual reproduction.
Most animals reproduce sexually,
which means that both males and females are required for the species to
survive. Normally, the honeybee is no exception to this rule: the female queen
bee produces new offspring by laying eggs that have been fertilised by sperm
from male drones. However, one isolated population of honeybees living in the
southern Cape of Africa has evolved a strategy to do without males.
In the Cape bee, female worker
bees are able to reproduce asexually: they lay eggs that are essentially
fertilised by their own DNA, which develop into new worker bees. Such bees are
also able to invade the nests of other bees and continue to reproduce in this
fashion, eventually taking over the foreign nests, a behaviour called social
parasitism.
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