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The Cape honeybee curiosity

A Cape Honeybee curiosity

The Cape Honeybee, unlike other honeybees, can produce pseudoclones of itself. In any other race of honeybee the story is as follows.

The young queen hatches and a few days later goes out on a mating flight. She goes to a special place when the male bees, drones, hang out. This is called a drone congregation area. Just like in a human bar, the males wait for women here and, when they arrive they all fly after her. The queen flies very fast and mates with the strongest fastest drones in an aerial affair involving up to 40 different drones. She then goes back to the beehive taking with her a 'tankful' of semen which she uses to fertilise eggs for the rest of her life. Fertilised eggs are female (worker or queen) and unfertilised eggs are male.

If the queen dies, the workers are female - they cannot however mate, so if they do lay eggs they will only produce drones. Hence in most beehives around the world, the queen is the only one who can lay female eggs.

In the Cape Honeybee however this all gets turned on its head. The workers can clone themselves, thus laying a fertilised egg. This causes all sorts of social problems that will entertain apidologists for decades to come.

A Cape honeybee hive without a queen can become quite strange. See the picture.

These cells contain many eggs (the small white 'bananas' at the bottoms of the holes). Normally a queen would lay one neatly in the middle. The greedy, opportunistic Cape laying workers however lay as many as 20 eggs in a cell, which is a mess and makes for a very non-functional hive. Eventually one of these eggs will get reared into a new queen who restores order to the hive and the story goes on.

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