Ten years ago I was in Apimondia congress in South Africa. At that point 
capensis problem was quite well studied. I met Mike Allsopp also visited 
beekeepers facing the problem and killing hives that shoved capensis. But in my 
eyes the final piece of the puzzle come later when the dna analyses were done 
and the invading capesis bees were found to be clones.

In this thread the invader capensis bees have been called laying workers. I 
think this misleads many. It is maybe good to remind that these capensis bees 
make eggs that produce workers, not drones ( like normal laying workers we 
know). And also these workers that are born from these special capensis bees 
are not actually workers, but queens, as they don?t collect nectar or pollen, 
just start laying more eggs that produce more same kind of queens. 

After the first invader settles in, the colony produces more and more ?queens? 
making more ?queens?. When the colony collapses it is full of these pseudo-
queens, and very few normal workers.   After collapse queens try to find new 
hosts colonies to invade. 

As the parasitic capensis bees are only with same dna, there needed to be only 
one special bee that had the capability to become social parasite. It could not 
do it in capensis hives because these bees have some kind of behavioral 
protection against it.  But scutellata did not have it and commercial apiarys 
with tens /hundreds of hives made it too easy for the queens to spread from 
collapsing colony to next. 

Ari Seppälä
beekeeping adviser
Finland

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