【英语时差8,16】蜜蜂繁殖

（单词翻译）

Approximately one-fifth of the animal kingdom, including ants and wasps¹, use this system. What it boils down to is that males are the result of unfertilized eggs whereas females are born from fertilized² eggs. But in bees there is an added complication since there is a gene³ that determines whether a bee will be male or female. It’s all in the numbers. Here’s how it works. A scientist isolated⁴ a gene called CSD, or Complimentary⁵ Sex Determiner. There are 19 different versions of this particular gene. It doesn’t matter which one of these 19 versions a male inherits from his mother; he’s going to be male because of the fact that he has only one of these CSD genes⁶. Accordingly, a female becomes a female because she has two CSD genes, except for one catch. And that catch is a bee in the bonnet⁷ of bee breeders. Honeybee breeders often inbreed their bees in order to ensure desired traits. However, when bees are inbred it’s possible for fertilized eggs to end up with two copies of the same version of the CSD gene. The result is that the fertilized eggs that would normally develop into workers or a new queen develop into sterilized⁸ males. Worker bees sense these sterile⁹ males when they’re still larvae¹⁰, and they kill them. Before you know it, your honeybee colony has died out. The good news is that now that scientists understand more about how sex is determined¹¹ among honeybees they may discover solutions to this problem.