> On Sep 12, 2015, at 10:51 AM, [log in to unmask] <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> 

> What I would like to know is how they produced so many and apparently did not know about them.  Would the drone mothers have to be sisters to queen mothers to get that level of inbreeding?



You aren’t really giving enough information. Why do you think you had diploid drones? Normally, these are never allowed to mature, as the bees eat them as soon as they figure out what they are. The bees themselves regard them as defective and do not feed them, nor allow them to mature. Genetically, they have two copies of a sex determining gene. There may be many of these genes, and the queen and drone do not have to be closely related. 



However, if they are closely related, as in brother and sister, the chances are much higher that they will be homozygous for one of these genes (have the same variant or allele). Then, the brood will be a mix of diploid workers and diploid drones. But what you will see is scattershot brood pattern, not diploid drones. It is extremely complicated to raise these drones to adulthood, and so far as I know, only Dr. Woyke has ever done it. 



He wrote in 1963: “There has so far been no detailed investigation of the disappearing

brood, and we therefore attempted to determine its sex.” He continues:



Homozygosity is approached by inbreeding. Kalmus and Smith (1948) have worked

out the results of various mating systems, including brother-sister mating used in the

present experiments. This results in half the eggs being heterozygous at locus X, and

half homozygous.



Later, in 1969, he wrote: 



Diploid drone larvae are eaten by the workers if they are in either worker or drone

cells (Woyke, 1965c), but not to the same extent if they are in queen cells



From brood produced by sibling-mated queens (see Woyke, l963a), 13 900 low-survival

larvae were hatched in an incubator; about 1600 of these larvae were used

for working out a method of rearing diploid drones in the colony



The low-survival larvae were hatched in the incubator and grafted immediately

on to royal jelly in queen cells in the colony, after removal of the queen larvae from

them. Three larvae were put in each cell, and when they were 2 days old the larvae

were transferred to drone cells from which the haploid larvae had been previously

removed (double grafting method).



Unless all the necessary conditions were present, diploid drones were not reared

at all, but usually it was not difficult to rear 15-30% diploid drones from the low-survival

larvae (50% females), and in some tests the maximum of 50% was achieved.



The diploid character of these drones was verified by genetical,

anatomical, and partly by cytological, examinations.







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