Science Promiscuous Queen Bees are More Likely to be Executed by Their Colonies Because it Increases Their Chances of Producing Infertile Offspring - Patrolling thots is just nature.

  • Queen stingless bees are at risk of being executed if they mate more than once
  • Execution is because they are more likely to produce infertile useless males
  • Stingless bees found in tropical climates as Brazil and are related to honeybees
Queen stingless bees face a greater risk of being executed if they do not remain faithful to one male, new research has found.

Stingless bees are found in tropical climates such as Brazil and are closely related to honeybees and bumblebees.

But while a queen honeybee may mate with up to 20 males, queen stingless bees are usually loyal to one male.

Scientists said queens which mated with more than one worker were more likely to produce infertile offspring, otherwise known as diploid males

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Scientists said queen stingless bees (pictured) which mated with more than one worker were more likely to produce infertile offspring​

The colony will then execute the queen because the offspring are defective and cannot reproduce.

And for every diploid male produced, it means there is one less worker bee in the hive.

The study, which was published in the American Naturalist, helped biologists to understand why some species mated with multiple males while other remained loyal to one, according to The Telegraph.

The University of Sussex and University of Sao Paulo compared the fate of queens in different hives in an experiment in Brazil.

Scientists found that the queen doubled her chance of being executed if she mated with two males.

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While a queen honeybee may mate with up to 20 males, queen stingless bees are usually loyal to one male. Pictured: A drone bee copulating with a queen bee
According to Francis Ratnieks, Professor of Apiculture (beekeeping) at the University of Sussex, the reasons for this is 'fairly complex'.

Professor Ratnieks said: 'In short, it is due to the genetics of sex determination in bees and the risk of what is known as 'matched mating''.

Normal male bees are produced from an unfertilised egg and therefore only have one set of chromosomes from the mother, and therefore only one sex allele.

However if the egg is fertilised it will have two sets of chromosomes - one from the mother and one from the father.

If the two sex alleles are different, the bee is female, but if they are the same it will be a diploid male, known as 'matched mating'.
 
A queen bee that makes a fuckton of infertile drones that can't work even if they wanted to (because evolution has programmed them to only know how to fly and fuck) seems pretty useless. Based bees
 
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he concept of "matched mating" confused me, so I found the original article where this report came from:
From what I can tell, these bees have their own version of the XX and XY sex alleles, except typically male drones would be just X and worker females XY. XX males would be the dangerously useless ones.

Interestingly,the chances of of producing XX males actually decreases as the queen mates with additional males, even as the rate of matched mating goes up. By the time she does it with 4 and above, the risk of XX males become negligible and the workers leave her alone.

However, it seems natural selection prefers that the chance for XX drones never comes to pass. Monogamy wins out.

EDIT: I’m a retard, @Positron does a far better explanation down the thread.
 
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Hymenopterans like bees use a haplo-diploid sex determination system. if you've got 2 copies of every chromosome, you're female. if you've got 1, you're male.

Except in reality it doesn't actually quite work like that. Instead they have dozens of sex determining alleles spread across multiple chromosomes. If you're homozygous for most/all of them you're male. If you're heterozygous, female. When there's that many alleles the odds are that the only way you're going to be homozygous for them all is if you're from an asexually produced haploid egg. The only way to really short circuit that is intense inbreeding.
 
The actual article doesn't say what the headline claims! (quelle surprise!). What the researchers found was that queens which bore high percentages of diploid males are very likely to be executed, and it doesn't matter whether the "high percentage" is 50% (queen that mate with one drone that shares her paternity) or 25% (queen that mate with two drones, one shares her paternity, the other doesn't).

The conclusion that the researcher draw, at least when talking to the journos, is baffling: they seem to assume the chance of queen-killing is proportional to the occurrence of diploid males, and thus bizarrely conclude that mating with two drones doubles the chance of the queen being executed! In the actual paper they entertain a more sensible hypothesis: that queen killing is likely triggered by a threshold of diploid drones (in their words, there seems to be a "sigmoid relationship between queen mortality and the proportion of diploid males").

The author then speculates whether queen killing is the evolution pressure that ensures monogamy in this species. Their analysis is fairly intricate and I'll skip it. What they found is that monogamy is one of the two strategies of maximal fitness (the other is being as slutty as can be and mate with 4+ males). Between the two "fit" strategies, however, there is a chasm of "unfitness" where the queen has a higher chance of being killed, so a chaste queen cannot easily become a Zoe Quinn (or vice versa).

The TL;DR -- Queen killing is not the comeuppance for sluttiness; the nest don't count the time the queen has scored.
 
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