Nature by Numbers

The bee ancestry code - Fibonacci numbers in Nature

The bee ancestry code

Fibonacci numbers appear in the description of the reproduction of a population of idealized honeybees, according to the following rules:

• If an egg is laid by an unmated female, it hatches a male or drone bee.
• If, however, an egg was fertilized by a male, it hatches a female.

Thus, a male bee will always have one parent, and a female bee will have two.

If one traces the ancestry of any male bee (1 bee), he has 1 female parent (1 bee). This female had 2 parents, a male and a female (2 bees). The female had two parents, a male and a female, and the male had one female (3 bees). Those two females each had two parents, and the male had one (5 bees). This sequence of numbers of parents is the Fibonacci sequence.