The female Cape bee is a renegade. She breaks all kinds of rules and disregards orders. In this isolated subspecies of honey bees from South Africa, female worker bees can escape their queen’s control, take over other colonies and reproduce asexually — with no need for males. Scientists identified the genes most likely to have instigated this unusually powerful worker bee behavior, according to a study published Thursday in PLOS Genetics.

The typical story of reproduction is that males and females of an animal species do it sexually. Generally, that’s what honeybees do, too. Sperm from a male drone fertilizes a queen’s eggs, and she sends out a chemical signal, or pheromone, that renders worker bees, which are all female, sterile when they detect it.

But the Cape honeybee, a subspecies that lives in the Fynbos ecoregion, a unique area of incredible diversity along the southwestern tip of South Africa, evolved a workaround where, in some cases, female workers can become something like a queen and produce offspring of their own.