Question

What does the below statement mean -
In honey bees, males don’t have fathers and thus can’t have sons but they have grandfathers and thus have grandsons.

Answer 1

Hint: Honey bees (Apis) are arthropods of the class insect and range from \[9 - 16{\text{ }}mm\] in size depending upon the species. They build a hive where they live in a colony consisting of a queen bee, drones (males) and worker bees (sterile females). Only the queen lays eggs in a beehive after mating with fertile drones in a nuptial flight. They produce honey from nectar to feed their young ones.

Complete answer:
Now to explain the statement given in the question at first, we need to know the reproductive cycle of the honey bees which leads to the development of three castes of honey bees – the fertile queen, sterile worker bees and drones.
After mating with the drones, the queen lays two types of eggs: fertilized eggs and unfertilized eggs. This can happen because the queen can control the fertilization of its eggs. All the fertilized eggs would hatch sterile females forming the worker bees and one of the fertile egg hatches into the queen.
The unfertilized eggs develop into males (drones) by the process of parthenogenesis. Thus, the development of a male does not require sperm. Thus, drones don’t have fathers or sons.
However, the queen always hatches from a fertilized egg thus would surely have a father. This suggests that every drone hatching from queen’s unfertilized eggs has a grandfather and so they would also have grandsons.

Note:
Parthenogenesis, a reproductive strategy, involves the development of female (rarely male) gametes (germ cells) without fertilization. It is common in lower plants and invertebrates (especially rotifers, aphids, ants, wasps, and bees), and is rare in larger plants. vertebrate. The eggs produced by parthenogenesis can be haploid (that is, have a different set of chromosomes) or diploid (that is, have a pair of chromosomes).