I was reading up on some past papers from the senior scientific programme and one question was.
“A queen bee is genetically identical to her workers” – discuss the accuracy or otherwise of this statement. Include Mendel’s Laws and Hamilton’s rule in your discussion.
Any suggestions where I would start with this. Ok Bees have a different number of chromosomes. Females, workers and queens have 32, 16 are contributed by the queen's eggs and 16 come from the drones sperm. A fertilised egg can only carry half of the queens 32 chromosomes so she can only pass on half of her genes to her offspring. Each egg laid by the queen contains a unique collection of her genes, so each egg is different. Drones on the other hand only have 16 chromosomes because it is an unfertilized egg. I don't know maybe I should answer another question.