Drones: are the sons of a selection queen “F0” genetically identical, with the same DNA?
- Yes.
- No.
Show answer
Correct answer: 2.
No.
Why?
A drone comes from an unfertilised egg. It therefore has no father and receives only genetic material from its mother, the queen. But this does not mean that all the drones produced by this queen are identical.
During the formation of the egg cells, meiosis distributes and recombines the queen’s chromosomes. Each unfertilised egg therefore receives a particular haploid combination of the maternal heritage.
What to understand
The queen is diploid: she has two sets of chromosomes. The drone is haploid: it has only a single set. It therefore inherits a recombined half of its mother’s genetic heritage, and not a complete and identical copy of it.
Even if the queen is a selection queen “F0”, her sons are therefore not clones of one another. They can be genetically close, especially in a highly selected line, but they are not automatically identical.
Key points
Drones transmit an important part of the genetics of a line, but each male produced by the same queen carries its own genetic combination. This is one of the reasons why the quality and the diversity of the males count as much as the quality of the queens in a breeding programme.