Queen Liz lays 2,000 eggs per day

Typos are the bane of a journalist's life. No matter how many times an article is spellchecked, proof-read and copy-edited, you'll still find that where you meant to write 'Tony Blair today defended his actions over the Iraq conflict,' you actually wrote 'Tongy Blirfish tiddle infendip crzwwldgdch spong spong someone get me out of here.'

A round of applause, then, to Reuters, who manged to take the typo to new levels today, with an online article about the genetics of honey bees which claimed that Queen Elizabeth lays up to 2,000 eggs a day.

Somehow, every time they meant to refer to the queen bee, the phrase 'Queen Elizabeth' was substituted instead.

This led to the article informing us that 'Queen Elizabeth has 10 times the lifespan of workers and lays up to 2,000 eggs a day.'

This was after we were told that 'With its highly evolved social structure of tens of thousands of worker bees commanded by Queen Elizabeth, the honey bee genome could also improve the search for genes linked to social behaviour.'

Click on the image to enlarge (which half cuts off the second sentence, an error for which I apologise.)

Tragically, Reuters have now taken the article offline.