You needn鈥檛 be a queen bee to give birth to one 鈥� and among Cape honeybees, Apis mellifera capensis, this can sow the seeds of revolution. It turns out that workers of this species can produce a new queen at any time.
In most bee species, if workers lay eggs the young are always male. In contrast, A. m. capensis workers can produce females, but tend to lay eggs only after their queen dies.
and of the University of Sydney, Australia, removed the queen and her eggs from eight A. m. capensis colonies. The workers laid eggs as soon as the queen was removed. Beekman and Oldroyd then put queen-laid eggs back into the colonies, leaving workers to choose which eggs to raise as queen. The pair found that workers preferentially reared their own larvae as queens, by giving them extra food (Molecular Ecology, in press).
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This illustrates how cooperation in honeybees is tied to genetic relatedness, says Mark Elgar of the University of Melbourne.
at James Cook University in Townsville, Queensland, Australia, says the speed with which workers replace their queen is surprising, which could be good news for keepers of this species.
