I grew up hearing “worker bees and queen bees are female.” Recently I’ve repeatedly heard “it makes sense to think of queen bees as a third gender.”
The more I learn about bees the more I think gender is a stupid idea in the first place and bees haven’t done anything to deserve having it inflicted on them.
Here’s what’s up with bees.
The bees that we call “male bees” - drones, which mate with queens - are produced by the queen WITHOUT a male’s interference. Drones do not have a full set of chromosomes, which has some interesting side effects, like lethal mutations being more readily expressed by them BEFORE they can be passed to a new generation. It also means every male bee has a “grandfather” but no father.
When a queen does mate, it results in larvae with a full set of chromosomes. The diet of this larvae has an enormous epigenetic effects on the expression of its genes. If it eats the so-called “Royal jelly”, it develops working ovaries and other reproductive characteristics and becomes a queen; otherwise it doesn’t, and becomes a worker. Two larvae that were genetically identical could have totally different adult biologies, with one being suited for reproduction, depending on this diet.
so truthfully I’m not super sold on “bees have three sexes”. From a chromosomal or genetic standpoint, they do not; the expression of the genes, not the genes themselves, differentiates queen bees from workers. You could divide them up by reproductive function or lack thereof, but I’m not sure where it gets you to say that sterility is a marker of a different sex. And I guess you could divvy it up by the social function or position of the bugs, but I don’t know how you start asking how that related to “sex” or even “gender” of a bug without immediately going “actually, yeah, all of our ideas about this are kind of stupid and we should just let them bee”. Which, as stated above, is pretty much where I’m at with it.
