Question

Why do make honey bees do not have father and cannot havesons but have grandfather and can have grandsons?

Answer 1

• Yes! A male honey bee has no father and cannot have sons, but he has a grandfather and can have grandsons. It is the peculiarity of the haplo diploid sex-determination system.
• In this system,the males develop from unfertilized eggs and are haploid, and females develop from fertilized eggs and are diploid.
• So, the male honeybee was created from an unfertilized egg of the queen bee, so it has a mother only and no father.
• However sperm was used to create its mother, so the male honeybee has a grandfather.
• And if the male honeybee's sperm is used to create the next queen, then the unfertilized eggs that she lays will become his grandsons.

EXTRA EDGE;

The concepts of “father” and “son” are not the same in the honeybee world as in the human world where nearly every boy and girl are fertile and can breed their own individual nuclear families of offspring.

In a normal honeybee colony, there are three “castes” of bees:

1. A singular Queen, who is the only fertile female, who has mated in the first month of life with numerous (around a dozen) of males and stored the accumulated sperm for later use. This Queen is the only creature in the hive who lays all the eggs, both female (fertilized) and male (unfertilized). So She has both sons and daughters. As a female honeybee, she has both a father (a stranger drone) a mother (likely the prior queen) and a maternal grandfather.
2. Workers, in the tens of thousands, who are all female (so they do have a father) but are infertile (so they have no children) who do do all the housekeeping and food gathering and storage in and around the hive. Workers have a father, a grandfather, but no sons or grandsons.
3. Drones, a small percentage of a normal hive, are the males that result from the Queen laying an egg without a sperm. He has a maternal grandfather, a mother, but no father. Daughters (workers and maybe a Queen) is dependent on whether he “gets lucky” with a young Queen. He has no sons.