GRE Reading Comprehension
Home > GRE Test > GRE Reading Comprehension Questions
Next steps
- Use your browser's back button to return to your test results.
- Do more GRE Reading Comprehension Questions.
Source: XDF
Typically the queen honeybee is mother to all the bees in a hive; after mating with several male drones from other colonies, she lays fertilized eggs that develop into all-female worker bees and lays unfertilized eggs that become all-male drones. According to natural selection theory, a worker would enhance her fitness --or ability to propagate her genes-by hatching her own eggs in addition to or in place of the queen's. But a typical worker's fitness would be diminished if other workers' sons, who have less genetic material in common with the worker, supplanted the queen's sons (the worker's brothers). Researchers, testing the hypothesis that workers usually somehow block each other's attempts to reproduce, put unfertilized eggs laid by workers and by the queen into a hive. Other workers quickly devoured the workers' eggs while leaving the queen's eggs alone.
Select the sentence that is used as evidence that worker bees are capable of thwarting each other's attempts to reproduce.