Several years ago I had the good fortune to meet Madeleine Beekman.
She is one of the foremost bee researchers in the world and has
traveled all over it. When she puts pen to page, I would guess that
she brings to bear the experience of that research and the research of
her many associates. She writes:

> In the Cape honey bee Apis mellifera capensis, workers lay female eggs without mating by thelytokous parthenogenesis. *Unlike other honey bee species*, where worker-laid eggs are haploid and develop into males, eggs laid by Cape bee workers are diploid and develop into females.

This information is unanimously corroborated by researchers all over
the world. So far from being common, queens from worker eggs are
exceedingly rare. And this is good thing, because self-cloning is a
reproductive dead end. The primary function of sexual reproduction is
to provide different genetic material which is recombined to produce
new and possibly better offspring, thus generating new traits which
allow species to adapt to the changing environment; that is, the real
world.

This is the norm in natural honey bee breeding; the queen mates with
numerous unrelated drones to produce colonies containing many
subfamilies; this genetic diversity helps the colony much like a
varied work force is needed in a human society. For workers to lay
unfertilized eggs would be to clone themselves, producing colonies of
bees exactly like themselves, a degenerate condition. This is what has
been seen in South Africa: the Cape Honey Bee is considered an
insidious parasite.

-- 
"A non-policing honey bee colony (Apis mellifera capensis)"
Madeleine Beekman, et al
Naturwissenschaften (2002) 89:479–482

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