Parthenogenesis Essay -- Asexual Reproduction, Honeybees

Parthenogenesis is a immanent form of asexual reproduction found most commonly in lower electronic organisms and plants. Sometimes known as virgin birth, parthenogenesis, involves the growth of an respective(prenominal) without stuffing. Discovered in the 18th century by naturalist and philosopher, Charles Bonnet, parthenogenesis is a progressive evolutionary strategy that some organisms have habituate to maintain a colony. Just as there are benefits to organisms that utilize parthenogenesis, like reproduction without the need of male gametes, there are costs, such(prenominal) as a slack in genetic variation. In the mingled eusocial make-up of honeybees, there are three social classes queen bee, player bees and drone bees. The queen bee, as the name entails, holds the superior position in the colony. The queen bee lays all the testicle in the colony, being the only bee with a set of completely developed ovaries and having life-long fertility (Back Yard Beekeepers Associati on n.d.). after(prenominal) only one mating flight were the queen mates with a couple male drone bees, she stores the sperm to later fertilizes some of the eggs. The eggs that get fertilized develop into female worker bees and the eggs that develop without fertilization produce male drone bees. Due to the high maintenance of both the colony and its products, i.e. honey, most of the bees in a hive are female worker bees. These worker bees carry on a magnitude of varied tasks, not including reproduction, which is uncommunicative only for the queen. The male drone bees are reserved for mating with the queen bee. Following copulation, the drone dies because of their barbed sex organ (Back Yard Beekeepers Association n.d.). Scientists have been puzzled at how this multifaceted organization is maintained bu... ...nd genetic factors play a part in sex-determination (Slobodchikoff and Daly 1971). even so in some other hymenopterans, parthenogenesis occurs via thelytoky parthenogenesis . There is a race of honeybee, the Cape bee (Apis mellifera capensis), which is known to exhibit thelytoky, the production of diploid females from unfertilized eggs, eliminating the enate genome (Heimpel and de Boer 2008). In the case of the Cape bee, the queen bee determines whether the eggs are monoploid or diploid (Oldroyd et al. 2008). By thelytoky parthenogenesis, the Cape queen be rear produce clones of herself (Oldroyd et al. 2008). Undergoing a different form of parthenogenesis gives Cape bees the favour of creating males that could mate with other queens (Oldroyd et al. 2008), involving one individual for reproduction, and a decrease in gene loss (Slobodchikoff and Daly 1971).