We recently identified a honey bee with two fathers and no mother! Here is the story behind this bee. 
A few years ago Boris (colleague in my previous lab group) conducted a large scale field experiment in Sydney, Australia on honey bee reproduction in workers. You can read what he found here: doi.org/10.1111/mec.14…
In order to conduct his project Boris spent weeks paint marking over 20,000 baby worker bees from 18 different colonies! Exactly like this photo
When marking bees of one colony Boris noticed a few looked abnormal. He thought it would be a good idea to collect these bees and brought them to the lab at @Sydney_Uni. A little while later Sarah started her PhD in the lab group and was given these strange bees from the freezer.
These bees were strange because they are gynandromorphs (sex mosaics): they have bits that look male and bits that look female. For example, male honey bee eyes are much larger than female eyes and this gynandromorph has a male eye on a female body.
Sarah and I spent some fun days together dissecting these strange bees. Sarah would later analyse the tissues with a genetic technique using microsatellites to determine the mother and father(s) of these bees – the same technique is used for human paternity tests.
We found these strange bees had a random mix of female and male organs. Also, three bees had large queen-like ovaries rather than small worker ovaries.
Sarah and I had dissected all the bees that looked really strange and I said to her that we should dissect the last bee, a normal looking female from the same colony so we could compare the anatomy. Once dissected the bee was added to Sarah's genetic analysis as a control.
It was only much later when Sarah analysed the genetic data that she realised this bee was actually stranger than the gynandromorph bees – two sperm fused inside an egg with no maternal DNA (androgenesis) and led to a viable adult worker.
Sarah’s genetic analysis of the gynandromorphs also discovered that one bee had 4 parents (three fathers and a mother)!
Sarah's summary of these 11 strange honey bees:
The paper describing these 11 strange bees just came out in Biology Letters (@RSocPublishing), please go take a look: rsbl.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/14/11/…
To clarify, Sarah's diagram shows morphological & genetic makeup of the 11 bees. Female tissue (red) & male tissue (blue). The gonads of each bee are indicated by different coloured clouds. Each father (14x) is represented by a different coloured sperm. Mother shown with crown.
