Question

A male honeybee has 16 chromosomes whereas its female has 32 chromosomes. Give one reason.

Answer 1

Honey bees have a system of sex determination known as haplodiploidy. Among honey bees, the queen has specialized chambers within her body to bear sperm she got from earlier mating produces, and she recognizes surely to fertilize every egg as it is after laid.

Complete Answer:
- To answer this question, we have to know about the genome of honey bees. Chromosomes are the structures that contain the genes of an organism.
- Bees have about 15,000 genes. Most animals normally have two sets of chromosomes. A pair comes from the female and one from the male. They are known as diploid.
- In humans, we contain 46 chromosomes; we acquired 23 from the egg cell and 23 from the sperm cell.
- Bees consist of various numbers of chromosomes. Queens have 32, 16 are provided by the queen's eggs and 16 come from the drones sperm.
- Since drones are structured from unfertilized eggs, they only have the 16 chromosomes that were in the egg. Drones are haploid due to the fact that they only have a pair of chromosomes.

Note: The principle behind the genetics of honeybees is that the female honey bees are formed from the fertilized eggs that follow independent assortment and segregation. So, there will be overall 32 chromosomes, where 16 chromosomes are from the queen and 16 are from the drone male that is mentioned above. That goes through fertilization and in this way produces a female.