TL;DR Messor ibericus queens produce males of their own and another (M. structor) species. They do NOT need to find M. structor wild males, although that was the case long ago. But now M. ibericus produce their own males who then mate and pass along their M. structor genes to a percentage of the queen's male offspring.
"Messor ibericus [...] lays individuals from two distinct species. In this life cycle, females must clone males of another species because they require their sperm to produce the worker caste. As a result, males from the same mother exhibit distinct genomes and morphologies, as they belong to species that diverged over 5 million years ago. The evolutionary history of this system appears as sexual parasitism that evolved into a natural case of cross-species cloning, resulting in the maintenance of a male-only lineage cloned through distinct species’ ova."
"Population genetic analyses revealed that M. ibericus queens are unable to produce workers without mating with males of another species."
"Morphological and molecular analyses showed that M. ibericus queens lay the M. structor males they require for worker production. "
"Whereas male Hymenoptera typically inherit their nuclear genome from their mother through unfertilized eggs24, our results demonstrate that M. ibericus queens can produce males without transmitting their nuclear genome."
"...[T]he clonal lineage exhibited extremely low genetic diversity with high genetic load compared with the wild-type lineage...."
https://www.nature.c...586-025-09425-w
