At 11:19 PM +0000 1/2/99, Madeleine Pym wrote:
 
>Now then how about this one!
>My father was told by someone at the National Honey Show here in the UK this
>autumn, that some researchers in Germany have suggested that it is not the
>queen that fertilises her eggs but the workers. They are suggesting that the
>workers collect the semen from the queen and deposit it themselves,
>presumably in the cell, after the egg has been laid.
 
How would a worker handle semen? If the egg is fertilized outside the
queens body, rather than inside, then it's probably going to require more
semen to guarantee success, so how would the queen meter out enough but not
so much that she depletes her stock?
 
But conversely you could ask, how does the queen fertilize her eggs
internally, and how does the  mechanism for laying drone eggs without
fertilization work. Either way, she's got to have a pretty effiecient
mechanism to allow fertilization with her finite supply of sperm, yet also
allow fertilization to be skipped.
 
Is there a turnstyle for the sperm, and a gate watcher that lets a few in
for each egg that saunters by?
 
What's intriguing about this idea is is that the queen could have two
separate dispensing systems, one for eggs and one for sperm. There's no
internal valves required to selectively let in the sperm. What's the queens
plumbing look like?
 
>Anyone else heard this one.
 
Nope.
 
Paul