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Anniversary of a beekeeper’s discovery of thelytoky in Cape honey bees

The existence of thelytoky in Cape honey bees was first documented in 1912 – making 2022 the 110th anniversary of this discovery. The significance of this discovery took a number of decades to be fully appreciated. The biology of sex determination in honey bees – where males are produced from unfertilised eggs while females arise from fertilised eggs – allows the reproductive female to control the sex ratio of her offspring. Hence, queens in honey bee colonies bias the sex ratio in favour of producing large numbers of females (that will be workers) and only producing males seasonally when needed. This gives rise to an exclusively female social group characterised by a single reproductive female (queen) and large numbers of non-reproductive females (workers). As workers are unable to mate, any offspring they produce should be male. Finding that Cape honey bee workers can produce female offspring was an anomaly that required extensive investigation to unravel its biological significance.