Drones as sons of drones in Apis mellifera

Kœniger, N.; Hemmling, C.; Yoshida, Takao

doi:10.1051/apido:19890503

Cited by 9 publications

(7 citation statements)

References 3 publications

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“…In addition to pheromones, the number of laying workers who develop depends on the protein balance in the colony: if there are a large number of larvae to be nourished, no laying workers develop, even if plenty of pollen and honey is available 1 Page and Erickson (1988) and Visscher (1989) reported that workers reproduce in small numbers during normal queenright conditions. However, Koeniger et al (1989) reported that the queen may produce drones who do not have the genome of this queen, but a genome that originated from the nucleus of a sperm. Drones may thus bear the genetic material of one of the males with whom the queen mated.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Social regulation of egg-laying by queenless honeybee workers (Apis mellifera L.)

Blom

1991

Behav Ecol Sociobiol

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If a honeybee (Apis mellifera L.) colony loses its queen and remains queenless, a small percentage of the workers will develop into egg-layers and subsequently will produce males. The process of differentiation into laying and non-laying workers is accompanied by a great deal of aggression within the colony. In this study, I tried to establish the relationship between the potential to become egg-layers and behavioural differences at the individual level. To eight observation hives, I introduced 200 individually marked workers of similar age and observed their behavioural differentiation during a queenless period. Shortly after the first egg-laying worker appeared, the marked workers were dissected in order to determine their level of ovarian activation. The future laying-workers seemed to be slightly more involved in the rearing of new queens than other workers. As reported by other authors, aggression was mostly directed towards workers with activated ovaries. Only a very small number of aggressive workers were aggressive; on an average, slightly fewer of these marked workers had activated ovaries. Aggression resulted in physical damage in only a small number of cases. The possible disadvantage of aggression for the bees under attack is discussed, as well as the possible benefit for the aggressors. Evidence is presented that the most detrimental effect of aggression for bees under attack is the fact that they lose considerable quantities of food through trophallaxis to other workers. Workers with activated ovaries withdrew inside empty cells significantly more often than other workers, possibly to avoid attacks. Aggressive workers were (almost) never seen to receive food from the bees they attacked. It is suggested that by preventing other workers from becoming egg-layers, aggressors increase their own chances of future reproduction.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Social regulation of egg-laying by queenless honeybee workers (Apis mellifera L.)

Blom

1991

Behav Ecol Sociobiol

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“…To our knowledge there has been only one other report of clonal reproduction by males in the animal kingdom, in which it was found that 3 of 61 queens homozygous for a recessive (cordovan) mutation inducing a brown instead of the wild-type black colour produced some brown males 12 . This showed convincingly that some males could not originate from unfertilized eggs produced by queens, but it is possible that these males were diploid, as sometimes occurs in Hymenoptera 13 .…”

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confidence: 97%

Clonal reproduction by males and females in the little fire ant

Fournier

Estoup

Orivel

et al. 2005

Nature

246

265

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Sexual reproduction can lead to major conflicts between sexes and within genomes. Here we report an extreme case of such conflicts in the little fire ant Wasmannia auropunctata. We found that sterile workers are produced by normal sexual reproduction, whereas daughter queens are invariably clonally produced. Because males usually develop from unfertilized maternal eggs in ants and other haplodiploid species, they normally achieve direct fitness only through diploid female offspring. Hence, although the clonal production of queens increases the queen's relatedness to reproductive daughters, it potentially reduces male reproductive success to zero. In an apparent response to this conflict between sexes, genetic analyses reveal that males reproduce clonally, most likely by eliminating the maternal half of the genome in diploid eggs. As a result, all sons have nuclear genomes identical to those of their father. The obligate clonal production of males and queens from individuals of the same sex effectively results in a complete separation of the male and female gene pools. These findings show that the haplodiploid sex-determination system provides grounds for the evolution of extraordinary genetic systems and new types of sexual conflict.

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“…Second, if a sperm cell fertilizes an anucleate egg, a sperm nucleus can potentially give rise to a clone of the sperm donor by ‘androgenesis’. Androgenesis is a well-established phenomenon in the honeybee Apis mellifera ( Koeniger et al 1989 ) and three ant species ( Fournier et al 2005 ; Kobayashi et al 2008 ; Pearcy et al 2004 ). In some ants a combination of androgenesis and thelytoky leads to the extraordinary situation in which queens clone themselves to produce daughter queens, and males clone themselves to produce sons ( Fournier et al 2005 ; Foucaud et al 2007 ).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Viable Triploid Honey Bees (Apis mellifera capensis) Are Reliably Produced in the Progeny of CO2 Narcotised Queens

Oldroyd

Aamidor

Buchmann

et al. 2018

G3 Genes|Genomes|Genetics

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The haplodiploid system of sex determination of Hymenoptera acts as an exaptation for species to evolve novel forms of asexual reproduction including thelytoky (clonal offspring of the mother). During normal reproduction in Hymenoptera, three of the four products of meiosis that are present in newly-laid eggs are lost as polar bodies, while the remaining pronucleus either develops as a haploid male or fuses with a sperm nucleus to produce a diploid zygote. In contrast, in thelytokous reproduction, which is uncommon but taxonomically widespread, two of the four products of meiosis fuse, as if one acted as a sperm. Queenless workers of Apis mellifera capensis, a subspecies of honey bee from South Africa, routinely reproduce thelytokously. Unmated A. m. capensis queens can also be induced to lay thelytokously by narcosis with carbon dioxide, but mated queens are never thelytokous. We artificially inseminated A. m. capensis queens using CO2 narcosis. Up to 1/3 of offspring workers carried two maternal alleles and an allele of one father whereas no three-allele progeny were seen in control queens of the arrhenotokous (unfertilized eggs result in males) subspecies A. m. scutellata. Flow cytometry of three-allele individuals revealed that they were triploid and arose from the fertilization of a thelytokous fusion nucleus. We then reared six queens from a narcotized A. m. capensis queen and determined the ploidy of the offspring queens based on microsatellites. One of the five daughters was triploid. Following artificial insemination, this queen produced unfertilized thelytokous diploid eggs at high frequency, and unfertilized triploid eggs at much lower frequency. If fertilized, thelytokous diploid eggs were non-viable, even though triploidy in itself does not impede normal development. In contrast, when the rarer triploid eggs were fertilized, a proportion developed into viable tetraploids. Our study highlights the extraordinary developmental flexibility of haplo-diploid systems.

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Drones as sons of drones in Apis mellifera

Cited by 9 publications

References 3 publications

Social regulation of egg-laying by queenless honeybee workers (Apis mellifera L.)

Social regulation of egg-laying by queenless honeybee workers (Apis mellifera L.)

Clonal reproduction by males and females in the little fire ant

Viable Triploid Honey Bees (Apis mellifera capensis) Are Reliably Produced in the Progeny of CO2 Narcotised Queens

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