> This is interesting. 

I think it is. I don't know about the others. But getting back to the butterflies. The whole idea was really that the female would recognize a potential mate as genetically "too close" and avoid him, essentially preventing a bad match leading to inbred offspring. This would be like encountering a girl that looks a little too much like your sister. Thought with insects, the sense of smell is far more dominant than sight for kin recognition. Again, it is hard to imagine how a queen could select males, based upon any criterion since they are pursuing her. Perhaps this is why bees have evolved other mechanisms to prevent kin breeding. By the way, it appears that inbreeding in bees is far less problematic than we might suppose. For example:

Here, we test the hypothesis that the level of heterozygosity
in individual honey bees is associated with the degree
of immunocompetence for two components of the innate
immune system. 

We compare
the immunocompetence responses in the daughters of
three queens each mated to one brother drone and one
unrelated drone. Daughters of the brother drone are inbred
and are homozygous

Daughters of the unrelated male are outbred
and heterozygous at most loci. 

Outbred and inbred individuals had similar encapsulation
and PO activity, indicating similar innate immune function.
Thus, inbreeding, and the consequent homozygosity
appears to have no effect on important branches of the
constitutive immune function of honey bees.

We therefore conclude that individual-level heterozygosity is of no
consequence in the ability of a worker honey bee to mount a
strong constitutive immune response. Thus, it seems that
genetic variability among individuals is more important to a
colony’s resistance to diseases than heterozygosity within
individuals.

Inbred and outbred honey bees (Apis mellifera) have similar innate immune responses
G. M. Lee • M. J. F. Brown • B. P. Oldroyd Insect. Soc. (2013) 60:97–102

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