Thanks, Phil. Just one more thing about bees that I found interesting.
When a new queen is created in the hive because of the loss of the old queen (I won't go into how that happens) she flies to a drone congregation area and mates with as many as 17 drones. She stores this sperm in a sac and when she lays an egg for a worker or another queen, she fertilizes the egg as she lays it. So a worker or new queen is a combination of two DNA sources, her's and the drone's. (Note that workers in the hive will likely have different ancestors - if the queen mated with Italian drones and African drones, some of the workers will be partially Italian and some will be partially African, for example.)
But when she lays a drone egg, she does not fertilize it. So there's only one source of DNA - her's.
So think about this for a bit. When the drone goes to the drone congregation area and mates with a queen, he is passing along his mother's DNA. There is only one stream of DNA in bees - the maternal line. There is no paternal line.
A drone is just the queen's way of passing along her DNA.
Mike
[Also, the generally accepted theory about why African bees are so aggressive is that bees were not kept in Africa. Feral hives were raided for honey. So the baddest, most aggressive hives in Africa survived and the most docile were destroyed. This is the opposite of what happened in Europe.
Additionally, bees (even Italian bees) are provoked by dark colors which is believed to be a response to this same behavior in Africa. That's why bee suits are almost always white.]
Last edited by Mike Henderson; 09-14-2016 at 8:10 PM.
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