Asexually Produced Cape Honeybee Queens (Apis mellifera capensis) Reproduce Sexually

Abstract

Unmated workers of the Cape honeybee Apis mellifera capensis can produce female offspring including daughter queens. As worker-laid queens are produced asexually, we wondered whether these asexually produced individuals reproduce asexually or sexually. We sampled 11 colonies headed by queens known to be the clonal offspring of workers and genotyped 23 worker offspring from each queen at 5 microsatellite loci. Without exception, asexually produced queens produced female worker offspring sexually. In addition, we report the replacement of a queen by her asexually produced granddaughter, with this asexually produced queen also producing offspring sexually. Hence, once a female larva is raised as a queen, mating and sexual reproduction appears to be obligatory in this subspecies, despite the fact that worker-laid queens are derived from asexual lineages.

Androgenesis: where males hijack eggs to clone themselves

“…In the remaining crosses, 16% of offspring carried paternal alleles indicating that some 'thelytokous' females were capable of fertilizing their eggs. The same pattern is seen in Cape honeybee queens [57], although in the vast majority of thelytokous species females are unable to fertilize their eggs [58]. Interestingly, two offspring produced by mated thelytokous female wasps were male, carrying solely paternal alleles.…”

Thelytokous parthenogenesis in the exotic dacetine ant Strumigenys rogeri (Hymenoptera: Formicidae) in Taiwan

“…To date, thelytoky has been well demonstrated for the Cape honey bee A. mellifera capensis (Beekman et al . ) and 12 ant species from four phylogenetically distant subfamilies, i.e. Cerapachyinae, Formicinae, Myrmicinae and Ponerinae (Wenseleers & van Oystaeyen ; Rabeling & Kronauer ).…”

“…To date, thelytoky has been well documented in the Cape honeybee, Apis mellifera capensis Eschscholtz, 1822 (Beekman et al . ), and at least 12 species of ants (see Discussion), including two species of Strumigenys Smith, i.e. S. membranifera Emery, 1869 and S. hexamera (Brown, 1958) (Ito et al .…”

Strikingly high levels of heterozygosity despite 20 years of inbreeding in a clonal honey bee

“…But this situation is likely to be rare or absent. The resulting queen would mate (Beekman, Allsopp, Lim, Goudie, & Oldroyd, ), and its offspring would not be recognized as clones because they would carry alleles absent from other clones. Because the clone population is large and asexual, genetic drift (i.e.…”