Job-hunting honeybees rely on 'meth' to find work

Re: worker bees not identical sisters

You are correct, plus a bit more.

Drones (as someone notes below) are haploid and male, workers and the queen are all diploid and female. They are not identical clones because firstly of meiosis which mixes things up, and secondly on a mating flight a queen tends to be very promiscuous and mate with six or so drones in an afternoon. Which must be quite tiring for her, not quite as bad as for the drones whose knackers explode at the climax of the act.

So with the semen of six drones in her the workers are half-sisters sharing six different fathers.

In a further mind-bending thought, when you think it through a drone has no father and cannot have any sons. He has a grandfather and can have grandchildren.

As that great philosopher Winnie The Pooh said "You never can tell with bees."

Re: All workers do all the jobs

Worker bees can lay eggs, however they do not do so to keep the colony numbers up, nor can they possibly create a new queen. Since workers are unfertilised, they can only lay haploid eggs, hence they can only produce drones. These are also normally stunted (due to being laid in worker size cells), and drone laying workers are a sign that a colony is screwed, since they normally will not even accept a new queen at that stage. Its best to toss the whole lot out and restart.

The article is interesting, because it explains the mechanism behind the fact that workers can do different jobs at different stages, and also go back to doing an early life-cycle job, like nursing, later on, if the colony needs it.

Re: Arizona State University?

What you are calling the North American variety is actually the european variety. Honey bees are not native to the american continent, and were all imported. African honey bees were also imported, and are a separate strain, but the same species, which means they can crossbreed, and together they have created a bastard strain of the two races, which are known as africanized bees, which have unpleasant characteristics.

Re: "Honey bees are not native to the american continent, and were all imported."

The Indians called the European honeybee 'the white man's fly'. Prior to the introduction of the white man's fly, pollination was performed by insects that specialized in pollinating specific plants. They were not promiscuous pollinators, the little devils.