I heard that unfertilized female worker bee eggs make only male bees.How can non-fertilized egg make anything?

Question

when the queen dies the female worker bees become capable of laying eggs,but without fertilzation,it just makes a male bee.This lack of female worker bees "kills" the colony. But without fertilization,how can an egg grow in to anything? Are the bees born with back-up sperm or something?

Answer 1

The phenomenon that confuses you is called parthenogenesis and can be found in numerous species, including bees, ants, but also certain lizards. Basically, all fertilized egg cells (zygotes) begin to divide and thus to produce a multicellular embryo, which eventually develops into the hatching young. This first cell division is in sexual species usually the result of fertilization. However, given certain circumstances, egg cells can undergo their first division without fertilization. Of course this means that the offspring that result are basically clones of the mother. That is, according to theory, the great advantage of sexual reproduction, namely that the offsprings are not merely clones, but genetically more diverse individuals (genetic material from both mother and father).

Now, honey bees show a high degree of arrhenotokous parthenogenesis, where females originate from fertilized eggs and males from unfertilized eggs. However in some subspecies you will find predominantly thelytokous parthenogenesis, where female workers produce sisters by parthenogenesis. This evolutionary strategy, hoever, can be problematic if other species or subspecies competing for the same resources may have an edge due to genetically more diverse strategies.

The molecular mechanisms of parthenogenesis are still relatively poorly understood. Since cell proliferation is facilitated by factors either removing the restriction of cell division or by activating it, it can be assumed that it is this molecular control
that is altered in parthenogenesis. In other words, in parthenogenesis the molecular mechanism preventing a ovum from dividing spontaneously is thus somehow removed, which causes the egg cell to enter division. What supporst this hypothesis is that parthenogenesis can be induced in some vertebrates by altering normal environmental conditions such as developmental temperature along with the chemical milieu.

I hope this helps a little.

Answer 2

If the queen of a honeybee colony dies the workers can raise a new queen if there are eggs
or 1-2 day old larvae in the colony. The difference
between a worker and a queen is based on the
larval food. A worker is fed royal jelly for only
about 3 days. A queen gets it for her entire larval
life.

Worker bees (some of them) are always capable
of laying eggs, even when the queen is still alive.
Because of the haplo-diploid method of sex
determination in Hymenoptera these unfertilized
eggs develop into males. As other answers have
stated the method by which an unfertilized egg
can develop is not entirely understood. It is likely
that it occurs in different ways in different animals.

The queen of a honeybee hive rarely dies except
by disease or disastrous accident. When the
hive swarms in spring or summer the old queen
leaves with the swarm and the original hive is taken
over by a new young queen. If a queen begins to
fail because of age the workers will possibly evict
her and raise a new queen.

Answer 3

Fertilized, or diploid eggs produce females, the unfertilized or haploid eggs produce males.
And it is not the worker bees that lay the eggs, it is the queen. The queen mates with the males in the colony (The Drones, which emerge from the non-fertilized eggs).
The queen also produces sterile female workers, these being the result of the Diploid eggs.

Answer 4

The eggs you buy in the supermarket are not fertilized, if you bought them from a traditional farmer (one that doesn't use hormones on the hens), they would be fertilized. There is a way to know it by just seeing the egg (the inside). There is a membranous jelly whitish thing that unites the yolk with the white. If you only see one, the egg is not fertilized, if you see two, one opposite the other, the egg is fertilized. The egg is unfertilized if the hen that laid it was given hormones to do so, and it is fertilized if the rooster was involved.

Answer 5

Diploid (female) versus haploid, from unfertilized eggs (male) (Ants, bees, other social insect colonies) .