You needn’t be a queen bee to give birth to one – and among Cape honeybees, Apis mellifera capensis, this can sow the seeds of revolution. It turns out that workers of this species can produce a new queen at any time.
In most bee species, if workers lay eggs the young are always male. In contrast, A. m. capensis workers can produce females, but tend to lay eggs only after their queen dies.
Madeleine Beekman and Ben Oldroyd of the University of Sydney, Australia, removed the queen and her eggs from eight A. m. capensis colonies. The workers laid…
