2006-12-18 04:48:29 · 6 answers · asked by Vetteboy814 1 in Science & Mathematics ➔ Zoology
1 female--the Queen. The rest are males.
2006-12-18 04:52:10 · answer #1 · answered by Scottie 2 · 0⤊ 11⤋
A honeybee hive can contain 40,000 to 80,000 bees in mid-summer. The worker bees are infertile females and comprised the bulk of the honeybee population. Drones are the males and never leave the hive. The have no stinger, which is a modified egg-laying device called an ovipositor and I mention this because bearing an egg-laying device, even modified, is something that denotes a female not a male. There can be up to 1,000 drones at the most, usually much, much fewer than that. That would make the female to male ratio about 40 to 1 to about 80 to 1. Perhaps 2% are male, and 98% female.
2006-12-18 15:37:56 · answer #2 · answered by Professor Armitage 7 · 3⤊ 0⤋
From College of DuPage (another viewpoint on the theme):
"Every fertilized egg develops into a female bee (mostly workers). When mating season comes around, a few of the eggs are left unfertilized. These develop into males — who are haploid, rather than diploid. A few of the fertilized eggs are fed a special food, and they develop into new queens, who are the only fertile females in the hive. So fertile females have to be diploid and fed special "royal jelly" and males have to be haploid. Actually, it turns out that if you force a hive to inbreed for a number of generations, which makes the population homozygous for more and more genes, a few of the fertilized eggs will develop into diploid males. It turns out that bees, instead of having a pair of sex chromosomes, have a bunch of sex determination genes scattered all over the chromosomes. If a bee is heterozygous for just one of them, the bee will be female. Normally, the only way to make sure that a bee won't be heterozygous at any of the sex determining genes is make the bee haploid — leave the egg unfertilized. Now that's weird!"
My thoughts exactly!
2006-12-18 05:25:32 · answer #3 · answered by Yahzmin ♥♥ 4ever 7 · 2⤊ 0⤋
The below link discusses the scientific errors in The da Vinci Code, no need to go into all that, but the site says that workers (females) make up approximately 95% of the colony, which makes drones (males) 5%...of course the males all die during the winter, so the ratio probably fluxuates which makes it hard to have a precise ratio
2006-12-18 05:08:57 · answer #4 · answered by neired82 2 · 3⤊ 0⤋
All the bees except drones are female. But the only one that actually reproduces is the Queen. The drones are the only male bees and are only alive long enough to possibly mate with the queen.
So about 99% female.
2006-12-18 05:04:00 · answer #5 · answered by phsgmo 2 · 4⤊ 0⤋
actually most bees are drones (asexual).
2006-12-18 04:56:46 · answer #6 · answered by satyr9one 3 · 0⤊ 3⤋