Honey bee life cycle lay fertilized or unfertilized eggs. Each unfertilized egg contains a unique combination of 50% of the queen's genes and develops into a haploid drone. The fertilized eggs develop into either diploid workers or virgin queens if fed royal jelly. The average lifespan of a queen is three to four years; drones usually die upon mating or are expelled from the hive before the winter; and workers may live for a few weeks in the summer and several months in areas with an extended winter. The weight progression of the worker egg, larva: Honey bee life cycle The honey bee life
Cape honey bee honeybee workers expressing the thelytoky phenotype can produce progeny by automictic thelytoky with central fusion (see diagram). Central fusion allows heterozygosity to be largely maintained. The oocytes that undergo automixis display a greater than 10-fold reduction in the rate of crossover recombination. The low recombination rate in automictic oocytes favors maintenance of heterozygosity and the avoidance of inbreeding depression. 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