![]() However, it doesn’t hold true if the queen mates with multiple males. This idea, developed by William Hamilton, was one of the inspirations for the “selfish gene” view of evolution popularised by Richard Dawkins. That means that female workers are more closely related to their sisters than to their own potential offspring, so in theory more of their genes are passed on if they help to raise their sisters. Being derived from unfertilised eggs, males have only one set of chromosomes instead of the usual two, and therefore all their sperms are identical. The selfless behaviour of the non-breeding workers may be explained by honeybees’ unusual sex determination system, called haplodiploidy. The survivor will fly to a drone congregation area and mate with around a dozen drones, storing up to 6 million sperm in her body. In some colonies, there may be multiple new queens, who fight each other to the death. She develops inside a special queen cell, becomes sexually mature, then chews her way out. ![]() Instead of pollen and honey, they feed her royal jelly, which workers secrete from glands in their heads. When the queen stops producing eggs, the workers select a new queen. Queens live for up to seven years, but they become less productive as they get older. After the act, his genitals are ripped from his body and he dies. Their job is to find a queen from another colony and mate with her. The queen can also lay unfertilised eggs, which develop into male bees, called drones. Fertilised eggs develop into females, who generally become non-breeding workers. Instead she spends her whole life making eggs, up to 1500 in a day – more than her body weight. The queen can hardly relax and enjoy the trappings of power, however. Most individuals in a colony do not reproduce, instead working as devoted servants to one breeding female. Perhaps the most fascinating thing about honeybees in particular is their cooperative way of life, which biologists call eusociality. Archaeologists have found evidence of beekeeping in the Middle East dating back at least 3000 years, lending credence to the Bible’s description of Israel as “a land flowing with milk and honey”. Bees mean a lot to us: producers of honey pollinators of crops and an exemplar for roboticists hoping to emulate their swarm intelligence.
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