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Anim Behav 1997 Dec;54(6):1483-90
 
Unequal subfamily proportions among honey bee queen and worker
brood.
 
Tilley CA, Oldroyd BP
 
School of Biological Sciences, University of Sydney
 
[Record supplied by publisher]
 
Queens from three colonies of feral honey bees, Apis mellifera were
removed and placed in separate nucleus colonies. For each colony, eggs
and larvae were taken from the nucleus and placed in the main hive on
each of 3-4 consecutive weeks. Workers in the queenless parts selected
young larvae to rear as queens. Queen pupae, together with the
surrounding worker pupae, were removed from each colony and analysed
at two to three microsatellite loci to determine their paternity. In
all three colonies, the paternity of larvae chosen by the bees to rear
as queens was not a random sample of the paternities in the worker
brood, with certain subfamilies being over-represented in queens.
These results support an important prediction of kin selection theory:
when colonies are queenless, unequal relatedness within colonies could
lead to the evolution of reproductive competition, that is some
subfamilies achieving greater reproductive success than others. The
mechanism by which such dominance is achieved could be through a
system of kin recognition and nepotism, but we conclude that
genetically based differential attractiveness of larvae for rearing as
queens is more likely.Copyright 1997 The Association for the Study of
Animal BehaviourCopyright 1997The Association for the Study of Animal
Behaviour.
 
PMID: 9521799
Garth Cambray           Camdini Apiaries
15 Park Road
Grahamstown             Apis mellifera capensis
6139
South Africa
 
Time = Honey
 
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