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Cape honey bee
The Cape honey bee or Cape bee (''Apis mellifera capensis'') is a southern South African subspecies of the Western honey bee. They play a major role in South African agriculture and the economy of the Western Cape by pollinating crops and producing honey in the Western Cape region of South Africa.
The Cape honey bee is unique among honey bee subspecies because workers can lay diploid, female eggs, by means of thelytoky, while workers of other subspecies (and, in fact, unmated females of virtually all other eusocial insects) can only lay haploid, male eggs. Not all workers are capable of thelytoky- only those expressing the thelytoky phenotype, which is controlled by a recessive allele at a single locus (workers must be homozygous at this locus to be able to reproduce by thelytoky).〔Lattorff, H.M. G., Mortiz, R.F.A. and Fuchs, S. 2005. A single locus determines thelytokous parthenogenesis of laying honeybee workers (''Apis mellifera capensis''). Heredity. 94: 533-537.〕
== Interaction with African bees ==
In 1990 beekeepers transported Cape honey bees into northern South Africa, where they don't occur naturally. This has created a problem for the region's ''A. m. scutellata'' populations.〔Hepburn, R. 2001. The enigmatic Cape honey bee, "Apis mellifera capensis". Bee World. 82: 181-191.〕 Reproducing diploid females without fertilization bypasses the eusocial insect hierarchy; an individual more related to her own offspring than to the offspring of the queen will trade in her inclusive fitness benefits for individual fitness benefits of reproducing her own young.〔Hamilton, W.D. 1964. Genetic evolution of social behavior I. Journal of Theoretical Biology. 7: 1.〕
This opens up the possibility of social parasitism: if a female worker expressing the thelytokous phenotype from a Cape honey bee colony can enter a colony of ''A. m. scutellata'', she can potentially take over that African bee colony.〔Hepburn, H.R. and M.H. Allsopp. Reproductive conflict between honeybees - usurpation of "Apis mellifera scutellata" colonies by "Apis mellifera capensis". South African Journal of Science. 90: 247-249.〕 A behavioral consequence of the thelytoky phenotype is queen pheromonal mimicry, which means the parasitic workers can sneak their eggs in to be raised with those from the African bees, and their eggs aren't policed by the African bee workers because they're similar to the African bee queen's eggs.〔Wossler, T.C. 2002. Pheromone mimicry by "Apis mellifera capensis" social parasites leads to reproductive anarchy in host "Apis mellifera scutellata" colonies. Apidologie. 33: 139-163.〕 As a result the parasitic ''A. m. capensis'' workers increase in number within a host colony, while numbers of the ''A. m. scutellata'' workers that perform foraging duties (''A. m. capensis'' workers are greatly under-represented in the foraging force of an infected colony) dwindle, owing to competition in egg laying between ''A. m. capensis'' workers and the queen, and to the eventual death of the queen. This causes the death of the colony upon which the ''capensis'' females depended, so they will then seek out a new host colony.〔() Martin, S.J. Beekman, M., Wossler, T.C., Ratnieks, F.L.W. (2002) Parasitic Cape honeybee workers, ''Apis mellifera capensis'', evade policing. ''Nature'' 415, 163-165 〕
抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』
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