Anthony Appleyard
House Bee
Wikipedia does not help much here. How much is known about the evolutionary history of honeybees, from fossils, or from how far genetic mutation drift has separated honeybees' DNA from the DNA of their nearest non-honeybee relatives? It seems likely that honeybees as we call them are descended from some sort of bee where virgin queens set off alone and each mated and founded a colony, as is still with bumblebees. Likely, sometimes a bee colony absconded imperfectly, leaving behind enough bees to patch up affairs and raise a new queen and rebuild their numbers, and thus colony reproduction by swarming started. After that, likely, colony founding by a lone queen gradually stopped, and then queens stopped developing worker bees' work kit on their legs.
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