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Differential reproductive success among subfamilies in queenless honeybee (Apis mellifera L.) colonies

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Abstract

With very rare exceptions, queenright worker honeybees (Apis mellifera L.) forego personal reproduction and suppress reproduction by other workers, preferring to rear the queen’s sons. This is in stark contrast to colonies that have lost their queen and have failed to rear a replacement. Under these conditions workers activate their ovaries and lay many eggs that develop parthenogenetically into a final brood of males (drones) before the colony perishes. Interestingly, not all workers contribute equally to this final generation of drones in queenless colonies. Some subfamilies (workers that share the same father) contribute a disproportionately greater number of offspring than other subfamilies. Here we explore some of the mechanisms behind this reproductive competition among subfamilies. We determined the relative contribution of different subfamilies present in colonies to laying workers, eggs, larvae and pupae by genotyping samples of all life stages using a total of eight microsatellite loci. Our colonies were headed by free-mated queens and comprised 8–17 subfamilies and therefore differed significantly from colonies used in an earlier study investigating the same phenomena where colonies comprised an artificially low number of subfamilies. We show that, first, subfamilies vary in the speed with which they activate their ovaries after queen-loss and, second, that the survival of eggs to the larval stage is unequal among subfamilies suggesting that some subfamilies lay eggs that are more acceptable than others. However, there is no statistically significant difference among subfamilies in the survival of larvae to pupae, indicating that ovary activation and egg survival are the critical components to reproductive competition among subfamilies of queenless honeybee workers.

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Acknowledgements

We thank Julie Lim for her indispensable help in the laboratory, Michael Duncan for his beekeeping assistance, members of the Social Insects Lab for stimulating discussions, and the School of Biological Sciences for the use of the Crommelin Research Station. Financial support was obtained from Australian Research Council grants to B.P.O. and M.B. The experiments described in this paper comply with the current laws of Australia.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Biological Sciences, University of Sydney, A12, NSW 2006, Sydney, Australia

    Caroline G. Martin, Benjamin P. Oldroyd & Madeleine Beekman

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  1. Caroline G. Martin
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  2. Benjamin P. Oldroyd
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  3. Madeleine Beekman
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Correspondence to Madeleine Beekman.

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Communicated by R. Page

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Martin, C.G., Oldroyd, B.P. & Beekman, M. Differential reproductive success among subfamilies in queenless honeybee (Apis mellifera L.) colonies. Behav Ecol Sociobiol 56, 42–49 (2004). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00265-004-0755-z

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00265-004-0755-z

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