> > the trait is readily found in most all races
>
>While it is found, it is not readily found... In the last decade there
>are only two colonies, that I know of, where the trait was discovered,
>one of these was in UK and the other in Australia.

Hi Dave,
I think you are referring to the cases of "Anarchy" that were found, where
many laying workers were thriving above a queen excluder. This is indeed
rare, but they DO NOT produce queens. I don't know of ONE single credible
account of a honey bee worker ever producing an egg that turned into a queen
(excluding Cape Bees, of course).

QUOTES:

[honey bee] workers are morphologically very distinct from queens and cannot
mate, but retain functional ovaries and can lay unfertilised male eggs.

In the Cape honey-bee, A. m. capensis from South Africa, workers reproduce
by thelytoky, laying eggs that develop into female workers (Anderson 1963).
This *highly unusual* form of reproduction results in diploid female eggs
following fusion of the nuclei formed by normal meiosis.

Worker reproduction, while common in queenless colonies, is rare in
queenright colonies, despite the fact that workers are more related to their
own sons than to those of the queen. Evidence that worker sterility is
enforced by ‘worker policing’ is reviewed and worker policing is shown to be
widespread in Apis. 

We then discuss a rare behavioural syndrome, ‘anarchy’, in which substantial
worker production of males occurs in queenright colonies. The level of
worker reproduction in these anarchic colonies is far greater than in a
normal queenright honey-bee colony. Anarchy is a counterstrategy against
worker policing and an example of a ‘cheating’ strategy invading a
cooperative system. 

Natural anarchic colonies are rare: we have seen very few, despite
inspecting thousands of colonies. Oldroyd first saw anarchic colonies in
1987 in an apiary in New Zealand. Several colonies each had more than 500
drone larvae above the queen excluder.

from:

Andrew B. Barron · Benjamin P. Oldroyd Francis L.W. Ratnieks

Worker reproduction in honey-bees (Apis) and the anarchic syndrome: a review


pb

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