A BEE WITH TWO FATHERS AND NO MOTHER HAS BEEN DISCOVERED

[underpants]

Newsweek title in all caps
Thanks to Floyd R. Turbo for leading me here


Scientists have found a female bee that had two fathers and no mother in the first documented case of its kind.

Honeybees are known as haplodiploid. This is a system of sex determination—females come from fertilized eggs, while males are the result of unfertilized eggs. But in one to two percent of cases, another system emerges—"sex mosaics." These bees are known as gynandromorphs and they develop from several cell lines of different origin and different sex.

Sarah Aamidor, from the University of Sydney, Australia, and colleagues, were investigating gynandromorph bees to better understand the flexibility of honeybee reproduction. While scientists know gynandromorphs emerge as a result of a genetic mutation, how and why it happens is not clear.

Most of the bees were found to have three or four parental origins—with two or three fathers to one mother. But their results also showed that one bee had been produced from two fathers and no mother. It lacked any maternal genetic material, so the scientists propose it was created by a fusion of two sperm.

https://www.newsweek.com/bee-two-fathers-and-no-mother-has-been-discovered-1233247

[LakeArenal]

1. Science.

Stuff that makes you go...”Wow”!

[Mike Nelson]

2. Please don't tell...

... Pat Robertson. He is already so far gone... this is likely to put him over the edge.

[lastlib]

9. It is BOUND to have a stinging effect on him......

[jcgoldie]

3. This makes no sense to me at all

I'm not a geneticist but I have been keeping honeybees for 20 years. When a colony goes queenless, they can produce a new queen only if they have recent eggs present that had been layed by the queen and they can turn them into larva for a future queen by feeding it royal jelly. If they have no such larva at the right stage, then sometimes worker bees who are also female will start laying in an attempt to keep the hive alive, but they are not fertile and the hive will die within about a month or two as it cannot reproduce and the bees live out their lifespan.

I do not understand where this "fusion of two sperm" from drone bees takes place. If there is no egg, where does the larva come from? (insert chicken and egg joke here)

I reread that and I'm assuming "no mother" is just a sensationalization to sell newspapers. It seems to mean just that the queen who layed the egg didn't pass any of its DNA to the offspring.

[WheelWalker]

7. A spin on the age-old mystery...

"What comes first, the chicken or the egg?" While the question may be unanswerable in its ageless form, this might be a path to some enlightenment.

[keithbvadu2]

4. Jeff: Life finds a way

Jeff: Life finds a way

[Captain Zero]

5. The science disciplines are going to be all abuzz about this

nt

[Backseat Driver]

6. An escapee from BBC's "Orphan Black" Neolusions Lab?

The "original" human had a partially developed embedded twin; hence two cell lines, Leda's and Castor's.

Product of a chimeric anomoly having no maternal DNA?

A tiny taste of "Roundup"? No wonder Nazi-rooted Baer wanted Monsanto!

No matter, this is fascinating!!!

[renate]

8. I cannot put into words how delighted I am to see a headline like this, especially in all happy caps

So cute! Like the bee is just sitting on a flower somewhere, and it and the scientist got to talking.

"So tell me a little about yourself, bee."
"Not much to tell, really. My dads and I live right over there...."