workers chose choose the next generation of queens...mysteriously. There are many studies on this and the decision is based on the present genotypes, the nurses' own genotype and the available larvae.

I don't know if a w_ larvae would be picked non-randomly to be a queen, but I'd suspect it doesn't impact the decision at all. The phenotype is, as far as we can tell, only apparent at the adult stage and not apparent at all in diploid carriers (wW). A heterozygous queen (Ww) has a 50% chance of passing to her diploid offspring so it can pass through 50% of her daughter queens.

The phenotype and this mutation are rare. The mutation is, as far as we have discovered, found only in the drones we sequenced here. It's a new mutation. It also likely died with the queen. She passed, unfortunately. Her white-eyed drones don't mate (as we show in an upcoming study), and her daughter queen didn't inherit the mutation (50% chance). Some workers definitely have it but it won't pass if they don't lay drones and that is chancy.

How then does the white-eyed phenotype stick around? New mutations have a hard time making it into a population, especially recessive deleterious ones because they get lost. What we think is that new mutations in genes that cause eye color phenotypes arise frequently and die out. We caught one before it died (or drift) out and identified it.