death of the queen. This causes the death of the colony upon which the capensis females depended, so they will then seek out a new host colony. Impact on other animals Although the Cape honeybee is regarded as being less aggressive than the African honeybee (A.m. scutellata) it can still be dangerous to people and other animals especially if the bees swarm and become defensive. In 2021 a group of sixty African penguins were killed by Cape honeybees in a very rare incidence of the penguins coming into contact with a local hive. Conservation status Although the species is officially classified as "not threatened" concerns exist that the subspecies might be declining in its natural range in the Western Cape. Threats to the subspecies include reduced access to flowering plants for forage, disease, parasites, and the use of pesticides and insecticides. In December 2008 American foulbrood disease spread to the Cape honey bee population in the Western Cape infecting and wiping out an estimated forty percent of the region's honey bee population by 2015. Over 300 hives were destroyed and more hives threatened with starvation in 2017 when large fires swept through the Knysna area of the Western Cape. Due to the impact of the fires on the bee's already threatened status resources were donated to setup additional hive stands and basil and borage after the fire to provide food to the bees. Additional fires, at the same time, in the Thornhill area (near Port Elizabeth) destroyed a further 700 hives. The use of pesticides by the agricultural sector is suspected of being responsible for at least one large incident of large scale hive death with an estimated 100 hives killed off on Constantia wine farms. South African non-profit Honeybee Heroes' Adopt-A-Hive initiative is a conservation project for the Cape honeybee. Currently the organisation maintains over 700 honeybee hives dedicated to improving the population numbers of the Cape honeybee in the Western Cape. Thelytokous parthenogenesis and maintenance of heterozygosity Parthenogenesis is a natural form of reproduction in which growth and development of embryos occur without fertilisation. Thelytoky is a particular form of parthenogenesis in which the development of a female individual occurs from an unfertilized egg. Automixis is a form of thelytoky, but there are different kinds of automixis. The kind of automixis relevant here is one in which two haploid products from the same meiosis combine to form a