Q.Give reasons for the following:

Step 1. Address (a). Honey bees show incomplete natural parthenogenesis (specifically arrhenotoky): in the same colony, fertilized eggs (zygotes) develop into queens and worker females, while unfertilized eggs develop directly into drones (males) without any fertilization at all - because part of their normal reproductive cycle genuinely proceeds by parthenogenesis, honey bees are described as parthenogenetic animals.

Step 2. Address (b), the drone's chromosome number. A drone develops from an unfertilized egg - since fertilization never occurs, the drone inherits only the single (haploid) set of chromosomes originally present in the unfertilized egg, giving it 16 chromosomes.

Step 3. Address (b), the female's chromosome number. A queen or worker, by contrast, develops from a fertilized egg - the fusion of a haploid egg with a haploid sperm restores the full diploid chromosome number, giving females 32 chromosomes (16 from the mother's egg plus 16 from the father's sperm). …

Connect the honey bee's incomplete (arrhenotoky) parthenogenesis directly to the resulting haploi …

• Treating (a) and (b) as unrelated facts rather than recognising that the chromosome-number difference in (b) is a direct consequence of the parthenogenetic mechanism described in (a). …