Rubinsky says there’s a median of 3 sperm / egg and that new queens use more sperm than established queens.
Sperm Use During Egg Fertilization in the
Honeybee (Apis Mellifera)
Maria Rubinsky
(search for a PDF)
https://dspace.emu.ee/bitstream/handle/10492/1717/Kristiina_Maalaps_MA2014.pdf?sequence=3
2.1.2. Sperm count on freshly laid eggs The total number of sperm used to fertilize each egg was established by 1) counting the sperm visible on the fertilized egg – it was assumed that all sperm released by queens during fertilisation would fixate on the egg and would be visible when examined with DAPI (Den Boer et al 2009); 2) +1 sperm was added to each sperm count representing the sperm already integrated with the nucleus of the egg during fertilization and therefore could 21 not be visible under the microscope (den Boer, Baer et al. 2009). It is realistic to add +1 to these counts, as it has been shown that sperm penetrates the egg 15 minutes after release onto the egg, and the paternal and maternal nuclei fuse at 93 mins (well before I removed the eggs from the frame and prepared the egg for sperm counts), which would change the appearance of sperm so that there are no longer recognizable as such (Yu and Omholt 1999)
bbkamodules 