Ingemar Fries & Anders Lindström wrote in "BREEDING DISEASE RESISTANT HONEYBEES":

Sex determination
Sex determination in honeybees is not determined by eggs being fertilised or not. The sex is determined by heterozygosity (hetero=different) or homozygosity (homo=same) (zygote= fertilised egg) of sex alleles at a sex determining locus (location) on the chromosomes. There may be 15-20 sex alleles coding for sex floating around in a free mating population of honeybees. Heterozygosity at the sex determining locus results in females, whereas homozygosity at the sex determining locus results in diploid males (see figure below). Such diploid eggs with only one sex allele are eaten by the worker bees as they hatch to larvae. In unfertilised eggs (hemizygotes), there can only be one sex allele and, thus, the end result will be a haploid male (drone).

This is different from what my bee teacher told me. My bees eat what??? Can you recommend a book that I can understand without a degree in biology?

Jörg

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