George William Onions left school early and trained to be a carpenter but started serious bee-keeping at Retreat, near Cape Town, in 1908. He experimented with the introduction of queens into colonies of Cape honey bees and confirmed earlier observations that the Cape bee differs from the European bee varieties in that a far greater proportion of the workers lay eggs. However, his careful observations also showed that the Cape bee workers have activated ovaries, and that their eggs may produce either workers, queens or drones, though mainly workers - a phenomenon that came to be known as thelytoky, a form of parthenogenesis. He reported his findings to the government entomologist and a brief account of his work entitled "Bees: Workers and queens from eggs laid by workers" appeared in the Agricultural Journal of the Cape of Good Hope in 1909 (Volume 35, p. 527). A few years later two further articles about his work, both titled "South African fertile worker bees", were published in the Agricultural Journal of the Union of South Africa (1912, Vol. 3(5), p. 720-728 and 1914, Vol. 7(1), p. 44-46). His work established Onions as a significant figure in apicultural history.
In April 1892 Onions married Jessie Elizabeth Massey, with whom he had two sons and four daughters.
