The Gene That Turns Bees Mean
Only a tiny difference separates docile workers from those that can dethrone a queen.
The Cape honeybee of South Africa seems at first like an ordinary bee. Like many bees, it lives in a colony where the only fertile individual is the queen, who returns from mating flights to lay eggs containing more workers, each pairing the genes of the queen and her mates. But in certain situations, in which the queen is absent or a worker happens upon another bee subspecies’ hive, a worker bee can rise up. Freed from the hormonal
