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Title: Inheritance of thelytoky in the honey bee Apis mellifera capensis.

Author
item CHAPMAN, NADINE - University Of Sydney
item BEEKMAN, MADELEINE - University Of Sydney
item ALLSOPP, MICHAEL - Plant Protection Institute - South Africa
item Rinderer, Thomas
item LIM, JULIANNE - University Of Sydney
item OXLEY, PETER - Rockefeller University
item OLDROYD, BENJAMIN - University Of Sydney

Submitted to: Journal of Heredity
Publication Type: Peer Reviewed Journal
Publication Acceptance Date: 12/2/2014
Publication Date: 1/14/2015
Citation: Chapman, N.C., Beekman, M., Allsopp, M.H., Rinderer, T.E., Lim, J., Oxley, P.R., Oldroyd, B.P. 2015. Inheritance of thelytoky in the honey bee Apis mellifera capensis. Journal of Heredity. 114(6):584-592.

Interpretive Summary: Cape honeybee, Apis mellifera capensis, workers have an unusual ability to lay unfertilized eggs that develop into diploid female offspring. This results from an mitosis that allows the developing egg to fertilize itself. The presence of a genetic anomaly was hypothesized to be the root cause of this self-fertilization. However, the results of specific crosses between self-fertilizing and non-self-fertilizing types of bees found additional genetic anomalies but did not find that any of these anomalies were the origin of self-fertilization.

Technical Abstract: Unlike other honey bees, unmated workers of the Cape subspecies of South Africa (Apis mellifera capensis) can produce diploid female offspring via thelytokous parthenogenesis. In all other subspecies, unmated workers produce haploid male offspring via arrhenotokous parthenogenesis. It has been argued that a single recessive locus thelytoky (th) controls the thelytoky phenotype and specifically that a deletion of 9bp in the flanking intron downstream of exon 5 (tae) of the th locus switches parthenogenesis from arrhenotoky to thelytoky. To further explore the mode of inheritance of thelytoky we generated reciprocal backcrosses between thelytokous A. m. capensis and the arrhenotokous A. m. scutellata. Ten genetic markers were used to identify 108 thelytokously-produced offspring and 225 arrhenotokously-produced offspring from 14 colonies. Patterns of appearance of thelytokous parthenogenesis were inconsistent with a single locus controlling thelytoky. Further, we found two novel tae alleles, one of which contains the previously described 9bp deletion and an additional deletion of 7bp nearby. The 9bp deletion is present in the arrhenotokous A. m. scutellata population in South Africa and in Africanized bees from Brazil and Texas, where thelytoky has not been reported. The putative th locus is also reported to affect the degree of reproductive dominance in workers. Our data are not inconsistent with this hypothesis.