What does "supersister" mean?

Any of a set of sisters of a haplodiploid species (e.g. honeybee, or any Hymenoptera) who are daughters of the same queen that was inseminated by a single male (drone). By contrast, full sisters of a diploid species (e.g. humans) share a genetic coefficient of relatedness of 0.5. Supersisters share 0.75 relatedness.

Supersister

noun

noun ·Rare ·Advanced level

Definitions

Noun

1
Any of a set of sisters of a haplodiploid species (e.g. honeybee, or any Hymenoptera) who are daughters of the same queen that was inseminated by a single male (drone). By contrast, full sisters of a diploid species (e.g. humans) share a genetic coefficient of relatedness of 0.5. Supersisters share 0.75 relatedness.

Etymology

From super- + sister.

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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.