The fact that a honey bee queen mates with numerous males means that some of her daughter workers have different fathers and some of them share the same father. Thanks to the genetic contribution from their father, these latter workers have an additional 50% of their genes in common and are known as "super-sisters". In contrast, workers who do not have the same father share only a subset of the genes contributed from the queen's side and are half-sisters. Overall, half-sisters have about 25% of theirgenes in common, while super-sisters share an average of 75% of their genes. This substantial difference in relatedness between different groups of honey bee workers within a colony leads researchers to consider that a honey bee colony consists of multiple "subfamilies." The existence of such structure within honey bee colonies leads to the possibility of both competition and specialization at the subfamily level. A recent paper by an Australian research team studied the phenomenon of competition in relation to the differential success of subfamilies in contributing to the final drone population output of hopelessly queenless colonies (Martin et al. 2004).
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