Workers in honeybee colonies are usually sterile and the queen is the only female reproductive in the colony. A single gene can however make a large difference. Workers which have two copies of the so-called “thelytoky” allele can turn into “pseudoqueens”. These pseudoqueens are workers that produce queen pheromones and start laying eggs. This gene is particularly frequent in the Cape honeybee of South Africa, where pseudoqueen workers have evolved into social parasites that invade a host colony, replace the queen and establish themselves as pseudoqueens to produce own parasitic worker offspring. The gene responsible for transforming workers into queens turned out to be a transcription factor, which interferes simultaneously in many regulatory processes and gene cascades. The same gene also manipulates the mode of fertilization and prevents sexual recombination in the genome. This way it maintains its propagation through clonal lineages that reproductively dominating at all organismic levels, the genome, the individual and the colony.