Abstract
Worker-reproduction is rare in queenright honey-bee colonies. When workers do lay eggs, their eggs are normally eaten by other workers presumably because they lack the queen's egg-marking signal. Workers use the absence of this queen signal to enforce the queen's reproductive monopoly by policing any worker-laid eggs. In contrast, in anarchistic colonies, the majority of the males arise from worker-laid eggs. Anarchistic worker-laid eggs escape policing because workers perceive anarchistic eggs as queen-laid. However, in this study, we show that eggs laid by queenless anarchistic workers do not escape policing and have very similar removal rates to worker-laid eggs from queenless wild-type (i.e. non-anarchistic) colonies. This suggests that, under queenless conditions, eggs laid by anarchistic workers lose their chemical protection and are therefore no longer perceived as queen-laid. Hence, the egg-marking signal seems to be only applied to eggs when queen and brood are present. This suggests that in the absence of queen and brood, the biosynthetic pathway that produces the egg-marking signal is switched off.
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Acknowledgements
We wish to thank Michael Duncan for his beekeeping assistance, and the School of Biological Sciences for the use of the Crommelin Research Station. Financial support was obtained from Australian Research Council grants to M.B. and B.P.O. We thank Stephen Martin for his comments on the manuscript and members of the Social Insects Laboratory for stimulating discussions. The experiments described in this paper comply with the current laws of Australia.
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Beekman, M., Oldroyd, B.P. Different policing rates of eggs laid by queenright and queenless anarchistic honey-bee workers (Apis mellifera L.). Behav Ecol Sociobiol 54, 480–484 (2003). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00265-003-0647-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00265-003-0647-7