Fig. 1

Design of the experiment. a A Capensis queen was inseminated with sperm from a single Capensis drone, to produce fertilized embryos. A subset of embryos were collected to produce the fertilized embryo methylome, while the remaining embryos were left to emerge to adult workers. When the queen was removed, the daughter workers began to produce diploid eggs thelytokously and these embryos were used to produce the thelytokous embryo methylome. b Early meiotic divisions in fertilisation and thelytoky follow the same process. The first meiotic division occurs after oviposition in a newly laid egg. If the egg is fertilized there will be 3–7 spermatozoa, one of which becomes the male pronucleus. During thelytokous reproduction, the egg is unfertilized and two maternal pronuclei fuse to form a diploid nucleus [31]