Hi all
First off, I want to apologize if the discussion has gotten too technical. Second, it has been hard to follow who is saying what to whom. Apologize about that, too.

Me: And the statement that there is no genetic change, is overly simplistic.

Randy: Perhaps, but factually correct, and an important point.

Me: To state that the workers are undeveloped is erroneous, the queen and the
worker are both fully developed but different with different features.

Randy: Don't know which statement you are referring to.  Workers are female bees
with underdeveloped sexual characteristics.

Me:

I flat disagree with both of these responses. It has been recently discovered that genome of an organism is NOT the same in every cell, that mutations occur even mitosis, not just meiosis. Secondly, you simply cannot separate the genomic information from the cell which possesses it and uses it. Any statement about "genes" and "genomes" has to include the fact that without a cell and an organism, they are just inert molecules, capable of absolutely nothing. 

Next, the notion that a worker is an undeveloped female is an example of what you will find in books like the ABC & XYZ. Completely outmoded concept. The two castes are fully developed, but in different directions. To say otherwise would be like saying a drone is an undeveloped female. A drone has the same basic genome as the worker, but only one copy of each chromosome. Add another copy, sufficiently different, and presto: female. 

But nothing in that genome says whether that egg will be a queen or a worker. Neither of these is truly a complete bee, since the queen can't forage and the worker can get inseminated. Solitary bees can do both, and presumably represent the ancestral state, from which social bees evolved. As we know, there are a lot of parasitic bees (cuckoo bees) which neither forage nor care for their own young, laying eggs in somebody else's nest. But they are fully developed examples of those species.

PLB

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