Bee genetics are wild. When I was a beekeeper we learned that queens lay two types of eggs - normal fertilized eggs, which will hatch into females and grow into workers if fed pollen, and queens if fed royal jelly, and unfertilized eggs, which hatch into males (stingless bees called drones) who will fly off and mate with the queens of other hives in spring. [1] At the time I had never heard of unfertilized eggs hatching, and the implication was that by creating male clones of themselves (haploid offspring, [4] not exact clones), queen bees are directly mating with the queens of other hives.
This information applies to the Italian honeybee subspecies kept in captivity (Apis mellifera ligustica) - the OP's article is about the african lowland honeybee (Apis mellifera scutella). The different honeybee subspecies are interesting: italian bees are nonaggressive, russian bees are hardy, etc.[2]
There's nothing special about workers having offspring either. When a honeybee queen gets old or weak, brood pheremones stop being able to suppress worker reproduction (worker policing fails [3]), and there are workers running around laying eggs in brood cells. Because workers have never mated with a drone, all their eggs are unfertilized and therefore hatch into drones [5]. This south african subspecies with a self-cloning female worker is really something unusual and unexpected, since those females should only be able to lay haploid eggs.
if people like this, there is an interesting podcast on lyfe and life. [0] Apparently, the people who do research to artificial life, where they create things in silico and try to make life evolve from them, constantly run into a similar problem. By the time one or two hierarchies of organization have formed, progress halts as it succumbs to parasitic behaviour. Afaik it is still a poorly understood phenomenon, and even the bee society doesn't look immune.
I wonder how we ever got here with all these parasites.
This gave me a realisation: manipulative (deceptive) artificial life and artificial intelligence are forms of parasites. But instead of manipulating/deceiving their host organisms, they deceive the humans who control the life simulation/the environment the AI exists within.
For example, if a human controller is trying to study the evolution of certain artificial lifes by filtering others out of the simulated world based on their behaviour, what happens? Life evolves to detect, if possible, when they are being observed and act differently in that situation to deceive the human observer. See this quoted passage [1] from [2]. This translates directly to an AI Safety problem (see e.g. the article that [1] is a comment on).
[2] Lehman et al., 2018, The Surprising Creativity of Digital Evolution: A Collection of Anecdotes from the Evolutionary Computation and Artificial Life Research Communities, https://arxiv.org/abs/1803.03453
Basically... Especially after beekeeping for a number of years, you begin to view hives as organisms (for example, reproduction happens when the hive swarms/splits)
Eventually a disease will evolve to target these bees or the victim bees themselves will evolve some countermeasure. At that point since they are all clones they cannot evolve a defense and will be wiped out.
There are probably still some minor mutations during the cloning (if they found a way to clone DNA perfectly 100% of the time that's a much bigger news).
The article blames 10% of local collapses on these particular bees. I suspect "mystery" means a complex system with multiple interacting causes. This is one of them buy may only exist in a few places in the world.
The USDA has kept the American bees' gene pool thin since the 70s; in the name of fighting "Africanized Killer Bees." suggesting a link between that and modern bee problems means one is a right wing, anti-government conspiracy theorist, in my experience.
"Instead of expending energy to get the colony back on its feet, workers will dedicate themselves to selfish schemes — such as finding ways to place their clones into positions of power."
Interesting... my friend and I were just talking about racialized inbreeding in people, the sort of thing people do (consciously or otherwise) to give their offspring social privilege in some racial dominance hierarchy. It strikes me as similar in some sense. Trading off long term genetic diversity for relatively temporary gain to you and your own offspring.
This information applies to the Italian honeybee subspecies kept in captivity (Apis mellifera ligustica) - the OP's article is about the african lowland honeybee (Apis mellifera scutella). The different honeybee subspecies are interesting: italian bees are nonaggressive, russian bees are hardy, etc.[2]
There's nothing special about workers having offspring either. When a honeybee queen gets old or weak, brood pheremones stop being able to suppress worker reproduction (worker policing fails [3]), and there are workers running around laying eggs in brood cells. Because workers have never mated with a drone, all their eggs are unfertilized and therefore hatch into drones [5]. This south african subspecies with a self-cloning female worker is really something unusual and unexpected, since those females should only be able to lay haploid eggs.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drone_(bee)
[2] https://www.perfectbee.com/learn-about-bees/the-science-of-b...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worker_policing
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haplodiploidy
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laying_worker_bee