Effects of cross-feeding anarchistic and wild type honey bees: anarchistic workers are not queen-like

Abstract

Unlike normal (wild type) honey bee (Apis mellifera) colonies, 'anarchistic' colonies are characterised by workers that activate their ovaries in the presence of the queen and brood and by the ability of their workers to lay eggs that evade worker policing. In the Cape honey bee (A. m. capensis), female larvae can manipulate non-capensis nurse workers such that they receive more larval food and develop into worker-queen intermediates or intercastes. We speculated that, in anarchistic colonies, larvae might produce signals that result in excessive feeding of female larvae. Excessively fed female larvae may then develop into reproductively active workers. In this study we cross-fostered anarchistic and wild type brood and investigated the effect of cross-fostering on the amount of food fed to larvae and on the morphology of the resulting workers. We show that anarchistic larvae do not manipulate wild type nurse workers into feeding them more, nor do anarchistic workers develop into worker–queen intermediates. On the contrary, anarchistic larvae are fed less than wild type larvae and anarchistic workers seem to be poor nurses in that they feed larvae less, irrespective of brood genotype.