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Worker reproductive parasitism and drift in the western honeybee Apis mellifera

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Abstract

When a honeybee (Apis spp.) colony loses its queen and is unable to rear a new one, some of the workers activate their ovaries and produce eggs. When a colony has a queen (i.e., it is queenright) almost all worker-laid eggs are eaten, but when hopelessly queenless, the workers become more tolerant of worker-laid eggs and rear some of them to adult drones. This increased tolerance renders a queenless colony vulnerable to worker reproductive parasitism, wherein unrelated workers enter the colony and lay eggs. Here, we show that the proportion of unrelated (non-natal) workers significantly decreases after an Apis mellifera colony becomes queenless. The remaining non-natal workers are as likely to have activated ovaries as natal workers, yet they produce more eggs than natal workers, resulting in significantly higher reproductive success for non-natal workers. In a second experiment, we provided queenless and queenright workers with a choice to remain in their own colony or to join a queenless or queenright colony nearby. The experiment was set up such that worker movement was unlikely to be due to simple orientation errors. Very few workers joined another colony, and there was no preference for workers to drift into or out of queenless or queenright colonies, in accordance with the proportion of non-natal workers declining significantly after becoming queenless in the first experiment.

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Acknowledgments

We wish to thank our beekeeper Michael Duncan, our lab managers Julie Lim and Marcus McHale for their assistance, and Gretchen Wheen for allowing us to conduct experiments on her property. We also thank Jerome Buhl, James Makinson, Nathan Lo, Ros Gloag, and Peter Oxley for helping to mark the bees. We thank the members of the Genetics and Behaviour of Social Insects Laboratory, University of Sydney, Andrew Bourke, and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on the manuscript. These experiments were performed according to the laws of Australia. The study was funded by an Australian Research Council grant to M. Beekman and B.P. Oldroyd.

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  1. Behaviour and Genetics of Social Insects Laboratory, School of Biological Sciences A12, University of Sydney, Sydney, 2006, Australia

    Nadine C. Chapman, Madeleine Beekman & Benjamin P. Oldroyd

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  1. Nadine C. Chapman
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  2. Madeleine Beekman
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  3. Benjamin P. Oldroyd
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Correspondence to Nadine C. Chapman.

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Communicated by O. Rueppell

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Chapman, N.C., Beekman, M. & Oldroyd, B.P. Worker reproductive parasitism and drift in the western honeybee Apis mellifera . Behav Ecol Sociobiol 64, 419–427 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00265-009-0858-7

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