It turns out it's not only Jesus who can claim to be the product of a virgin birth. New research from the University of Sydney has discovered the gene that allows South African Cape honey bees to procreate without ever having sex.
According to behavioural geneticist Professor Benjamin Oldroyd, scientists have been on the hunt for the mysterious gene for over 30 years.
"Now that we know it's on chromosome 11, we have solved a mystery," Prof Oldroyd said.
It might sound like bad news for the bees, but Prof Oldroyd says asexuality is a much more efficient way to reproduce, and every now and then we see a species revert to it. Although, reversions to asexual reproduction are rare in nature, and according to researchers, this might be the first of this scale that's been discovered.
How does the gene work?
According to Prof Oldroyd, "Males are mostly useless." We should point out, he's referring to bees. But the Cape honey bee is the exception, because this newly discovered gene has allowed worker bees to lay eggs that only produce females.
"Cape workers can become genetically reincarnated as a female queen and that prospect changes everything," he said.
An excess of female bees means more work may be getting done but the once cooperative society is in chaos. Like any political spill when the queen bee needs to be replaced, the Cape honey bee colonies are conflict zones of infighting. Prof Oldroyd says that's because any worker can be genetically reincarnated as the next queen.
"When a colony loses its queen the workers fight and compete to be the mother of the next queen," Prof Oldroyd said.
"This is a bee we must keep out of Australia"
The Cape honey bee is not like other honey bees. The ovaries of worker bees are larger and more readily activated than other honey bee subspecies. It means they are able to create queen pheromones that allow them to assert reproductive dominance in a colony.
And while the need for larger bee populations have been called for across the globe, this is something researchers don't want to see on these shores. With this reproductive pattern. Cape bee workers invade foreign colonies, procreate and coax the host colony workers to feed their larvae.
"This is a bee we must keep out of Australia," Professor Oldroyd said.
In South Africa, the social parasite behaviour in Cape honey bees leads to the death of 10,000 colonies of commercial bee hives every year.
So they don't have sex. Why is this discovery important?
It turns out, no-sex reproduction could be handy. Prof Oldroyd says, "Further study of Cape bees could give us insight into two major evolutionary transitions: the origin of sex and the origin of animal societies."
"If we could control a switch that allows animals to reproduce asexually, that would have important applications in agriculture, biotechnology and many other fields," Prof Oldroyd said.
