Super Spider??

[Gooseman]

I got an idea... just breed two bumblebees together... any "spiders" would have to be homozygous....

[Brimstone111888]

I got an idea... just breed two bumblebees together... any "spiders" would have to be homozygous....

Thats something I was thinking of but only backwards. Get a super pastel and a possible homo spider and all the offspring should be bumblebees.

Also homozygous lethality isn't uncommon or out of the question. Take in humans. Dwarfism is a dominant gene that is homozygous lethal. If 2 dwarfs make a baby there is a 50% chance to make another dwarf, 25% chance for a death due to the gene, and a 25% chance for a normal baby.

[ctrlfreq]

I got an idea... just breed two bumblebees together... any "spiders" would have to be homozygous....

Two bees together would have the same chance of throwing heterozygous spider offspring as breeding two spiders.

[Gooseman]

...how would you get a spider from a bumblebee pairing that was NOT homozygous for spider? because anything het in a bumblebee pairing is another bumblebee.... your other possible results is a super pastel and a "super" spider....???

[muddoc]

Actually, draw the punnett square, and you'll ba amazed to see that you can hatch a normal Ball python by pairing a Bumblebee to a Bumblebee.

[ctrlfreq]

...how would you get a spider from a bumblebee pairing that was NOT homozygous for spider?

Bumblebees are heterozygous for pastel and can be either heterozygous or homozygous for spider. The reason we don't know whether they are heterozygous or homozygous is because both forms are identical visually.

The possible results (each with varying odds) of breeding two bumblebees are normals, pastels, spiders, bumblebees, and killer bees -- unless one or both are homozygous for spider. If that is the case, normals and pastels would not be possible, but whether the offspring are homo or hetero for spider would be unknown without extensive breeding, each time only producing spider offspring.

[RandyRemington]

But we don't know if there has ever been a homozygous spider or what they look like.

You’re pretty safe assuming your bumblebees are only het for spider.

I think the confusion here is coming from the relationship between spider and pastel. There apparently is none. The production of killer bees proves that spider and pastel are two different genes and as early and often as killer bees have been produced it sure doesn't look like the two genes are near each other.

So a bumblebee has the spider mutant gene paired with a normal copy of the spider gene and the pastel mutant gene paired with a normal copy of the pastel gene and it passes or doesn't pass those to its offspring independently. So, just as both parents could give the normal for spider version of that gene they could also both give the normal for pastel version of the separate pastel locus and produce a complete normal.