Parthenogenesis Essay -- Asexual Reproduction, Honeybees

Parthenogenesis is a natural form of asexual nurture found most comm unless in lower organisms and plants. Sometimes know as virgin birth, parthenogenesis, involves the growth of an individual without fertilization. Discovered in the eighteenth century by naturalist and philosopher, Charles Bonnet, parthenogenesis is a progressive evolutionary strategy that some organisms confirm employed to maintain a colony. estimable as there argon benefits to organisms that utilize parthenogenesis, like reproduction without the claim of male gametes, there are costs, such as a lessen in genetic variation. In the intricate eusocial organization of honeybees, there are three social classes queen bee, worker bees and droning on bees. The queen bee, as the name entails, holds the superior position in the colony. The queen bee lays all the testis in the colony, being the only bee with a set of completely essential ovaries and having life-long fertility (Back Yard Beekeepers Association n.d.). After only one conjugation 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 young-bearing(prenominal) 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 obtain on a magnitude of diametrical tasks, not including reproduction, which is reserved only for the queen. The male drone bees are reserved for mating with the queen bee. quest 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 bit a part in sex-determination (Slobodchikoff and Daly 1971). However in some different hymenopterans, parthenogenesis occurs via thelytoky parthenogenes is. There is a subspecies of honeybee, the mantelpiece bee (Apis mellifera capensis), which is known to pose thelytoky, the production of diploid females from unfertilized eggs, eliminating the paternal genome (Heimpel and de Boer 2008). In the case of the Cape bee, the queen bee determines whether the eggs are haploid or diploid (Oldroyd et al. 2008). By thelytoky parthenogenesis, the Cape queen be can produce clones of herself (Oldroyd et al. 2008). Undergoing a different form of parthenogenesis gives Cape bees the advantage of creating males that could mate with other queen (Oldroyd et al. 2008), involving one individual for reproduction, and a decrease in gene divergence (Slobodchikoff and Daly 1971).