I was noticing today at the entrance that there were some workers that had different stripes than the rest. More yellow and less black. At first I thought I was seeing drones and workers but they were the same size and I know what my drones look like. Are these from a different give? (I’m trying to post a pic from my phone )
Your photos didn’t post, as you can probably tell…
However, let me just put this thought out there. If you have a naturally mated queen (most of us do), she will have mated with between 10 and 25 drones, all with slightly different genetics. The sperm from these drones remains somewhat compartmentalized within the queen. She goes through a sperm packet from one drone, until it runs out, then she uses the sperm from another drone and so on. So every couple of months, you may notice the color and other characteristics of your bees varying a little. Just the next batch of half-sisters is from a different dad - normal in a hive!
Looks like the new bee is Italian, and the others may be Russian/Carniolan.
This little chart that @Valli posted shows the color differences quite nicely:
http://forum.honeyflow.com/t/types-of-queens/6567/3?u=dawn_sd
Queens mate with multiple drones. Each drone’s sperm are identical to all of their other sperm because the drone is a haploid organism with only one set of genes. So the offspring from each drone makes up a subfamily in the colony where they are closer related than siblings Each subfamily has a fixed set of genes from their father and a random set from the queen.
Everybody is right. Different patrilines