Anal wisdom
The Afterweisel is a bee-related, but above all beekeeping technical term. Afterweisel are often referred to as drone mothers .
description
The vast majority of a bee colony consists of worker bees , that is, females whose ovaries are not fully developed. This is due to the diet during the development of the finished insect. Furthermore, the queen bee constantly releases a pheromone , the so-called queen substance, which triggers processes that prevent the workers' eggs from ripening .
If a colony loses its queen during the vegetation period , i.e. becomes whisperless, a new queen can be raised from the young existing worker brood (beekeeping: recreated). However, things look different in winter or early spring. At these times of the year there is no brood for replenishment. Due to the lack of queen substance, eggs begin to develop in the ovaries of some workers after a few days, which then also begin to lay. Since these bees, known as Afterweisel, have no seminal vesicle, let alone a store of semen, their eggs only have one haploid set of chromosomes, and this parthenogenesis (virgin generation) only results in drones .
Even in an intact bee colony with a fully-fledged and healthy queen, a few individual bees (about one in a thousand) lay eggs despite the inhibition by the queen substance. However, these are then removed immediately by the other workers and cannot be discovered by the beekeeper when they look through them. These bees do not yet have a “following” for brood care etc.
In contrast to a colony of bees with individual anus females, drone breeding or humpback breeding can also occur if there is a queen in the colony who was not mated or who no longer has a sufficient supply of semen. In these cases, however, there are many more brood cells. The anal womb, on the other hand, can only lay a few eggs, which they attach to the cell wall because of their shorter abdomen. A queen, on the other hand, always lays the egg on the bottom of the cell.
On occasion Nachschwärmen to the development of queen bees after, when the young, still virgin queen from her Begattungsflug not return.
Peoples with anal wounds perish because there is no renewal of the substance on workers. In beekeeping practice, such colonies are usually dissolved. The otherwise usual addition of a new queen bee is only possible with additional effort, since the drone mothers do not differ optically from the other bees and therefore cannot be removed. It is not the anal weasels themselves that are dangerous for the added queen, but the “following” formed in their environment.
Female parthenogenesis in the cape bee
The southernmost representative ( breed ) of the western honeybee , the cape bee ( Am capensis ), is a specialty . With her, workers are able to lay eggs which, despite parthenogenesis , produce females again and thus the bee colony does not perish.