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Date: | Wed, 5 Jun 1996 16:12:14 +0600 |
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Are all memeber of the lsit receiving this post over and over or just me?
>
> A question was recently asked about whether bees move eggs and or
> larvae. Mark Winston and I once did a study in which we made
> colonies of Africanized bees queenless, then followed all events
> related to queen rearing and swarming. After becoming queenless, the
> bees constructed queen cups that were empty; following that either
> eggs or larvae (Mark would have the details) appeared in the cells
> and were reared into queens. Since the queen had been removed and
> females (queens) were reared, it is logical to assume that the eggs
> were moved by the bees.
> The second situation we have seen several times, in which queen
> cells are produced in honey supers above a queen excluder. In these
> cases all other brood was contained below the queen excluder, so I am
> fairly certain that the queen did not lay the eggs in the queen cells
> herself. Again it is most likely that workers moved the eggs/larvae
> up into the cells.
> It seems virtually impossible to imagine that bees would steal
> eggs or larvae from other colonies.
> There is another possibility to explain the queenless colony that
> got a new queen. It is well known that worker bees can lay eggs, but
> usually these are haploid (unfertilized) and develop into drones.
> One bee race, the Cape honey bee (A. mellifera capensis) is notorious
> for having workers that lay diploid eggs (with two sets of
> chromosomes). The number of chromosomes gets halved in the formation
> of the egg, but then a polar body with one set of chromosomes fuses
> with the egg nucleus to form a diploid nucleus that is analagous to a
> fertilized egg, and the bees can rear females from these. It turns
> out this physiological adaptation is present at low frequency in
> other bee races. I believe it was W.C. Roberts or O. Mackensen
> discovered that 1-2% of colonies of other bee races, in the absence
> of brood from which to rear a queen, would still eventually become
> queen-right, apparently through the production of diploid worker eggs.
> Hope this may clarify the situation somewhat.
>
> Dr. Gard W. Otis
> Dept. of Environmental Biology
> University of Guelph
> Guelph, Ontario
> Canada N1G 2W1
> [log in to unmask]
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