IN HONEYBEES, males don’t have fathers, queens are promiscuous and bee breeders struggle to develop pure-bred animals – and now we finally understand why.
It was 1845 when a Polish parish priest named Johann Dzierzon discovered that male bees have no fathers. Unfertilised bee eggs, which we now know contain only one set of chromosomes (haploidy), develop into males. Fertilised eggs, with two sets of chromosomes (diploidy), become females. Ants and wasps have the same sex determination system, but how it works has been a mystery.
Occasionally, however, it goes wrong, and a fertilised egg develops into a diploid male, whose…
