system
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human
Are hive insects incestuous? If so, how do they deal with inbreeding?

A thought just hit me and got me wondering.

Bees, ants wasps, etc. have one queen who produces all of the hive's offspring. I'm not sure how it goes with ants but IIRC with bees the queen regularly mates with drones.

Are these drones that hatched from the queen's own eggs? Does this lead to inbreeding? Or do drones regularly visit other hives?

Edit: Thanks for all the awesome answers guys!

The same question really goes for flightless insects too. I'm guessint it'd be a lot harder for a male ant to go about and find a queen he's not related to have invertebrate sex with.
gpt
> Are these drones that hatched from the queen's own eggs? Does this lead to inbreeding? Or do drones regularly visit other hives?

The queen uses sperm from drones from another colony. But these drones do not fly over and visit the colony itself. The queen mates during one mating flight early in her life. Sperm is stored at that moment and used for the rest of the life of the colony. Many worker individuals come from unfertilized eggs the queen lays, but they don't reproduce.

So no, they are not inbreeding at all. The entire point of the mating flight is to cross genes over a sufficiently diverse geographic distance.