Benjamin P. Oldroyd, Michael H. Allsopp, Rosalyn S. Gloag, Julianne Lim, Lyndon A. Jordan, and Madeleine Beekman

摘要

The subspecies of honeybee indigenous to the Cape region of South Africa, Apis mellifera capensis, is uniquenbecause a high proportion of unmated workers can lay eggs that develop into females via thelytokousnparthenogenesis involving central fusion of meiotic products. This ability allows pseudoclonal lineages ofnworkers to establish, which are presently widespread as reproductive parasites within the honeybeenpopulations of South Africa. Successful long-term propagation of a parthenogen requires the maintenancenof heterozygosity at the sex locus, which in honeybees must be heterozygous for the expression of femalentraits. Thus, in successful lineages of parasitic workers, recombination events are reduced by an order ofnmagnitude relative to meiosis in queens of other honeybee subspecies. Here we show that in unmated A. m.ncapensis queens treated to induce oviposition, no such reduction in recombination occurs, indicating thatnthelytoky and reduced recombination are not controlled by the same gene. Our virgin queens were able tonlay both arrhenotokous male-producing haploid eggs and thelytokous female-producing diploid eggs at thensame time, with evidence that they have some voluntary control over which kind of egg was laid. If so, they arenable to influence the kind of second-division meiosis that occurs in their eggs post partum.