The honey bee found in South Africa, the gene allowed to lay eggs that produce only females, and not normal males, like other honey bees.
The ability to produce daughters asexually, known as thelytokous parthenogenesis, is limited to one subspecies inhabiting the Cape region of South Africa, a cape of honey bees that are called Apis mellifera capensis in Latin.
Several other features distinguish this honey bee from other subspecies of honey bees. In particular, the ovaries of working bees are larger and more easily activated, and they are able to produce uterine pheromones, which allows them to claim reproductive dominance in the colony.
These traits also lead to a tendency to social parasitism – behavior in which worker bees invade other colonies, breed and convince workers in the receiving colony to feed other people’s larvae. Every year, 10,000 colonies of commercial hives die in South Africa due to the social behavior of parasites of honey bees.
The existence of such bees has been known for more than a hundred years, but only recently, using modern genomic tools, scientists were able to understand the actual gene that leads to the birth of virgin bees.
Perhaps the most exciting perspective that emerges from this study is the ability to understand how such a gene actually works. If scientists could control a switch that allows animals to breed asexually, it would have important applications in agriculture, biotechnology, and many other fields. For example, many species of pests, such as fire ants, are thelytokous, although, unfortunately, they have a different gene than the one found in Capensis.
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