Heirs and spares: caste conflict and excess queen production in Melipona bees
By Francis L. W. Ratnieks. Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology, 2001
86 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Abstract. The caste conflict hypothesis states that there is potential conflict over the caste fate of totipotent immature females in social insects. In most species, an immature female has little control over her fate because workers control her nutrition. However, in Melipona bees, immature females should have considerable control over their own caste fate because they develop on a provision mass in a sealed cell, and because queens are not larger than workers. This may explain why, in Melipona, large numbers of queens are reared only to be executed. (Because Melipona colonies are founded by swarms very few reproductive opportunities for adult queens occur.) This study uses a one-locus genetic model to determine the optimum proportion of females that should develop into queens from the perspective of immature totipotent females who control their own caste fate. For a population in which all colonies are headed by a single, single-mated queen, which is the typical situation in Melipona, the optimum rises from 14–20% as male production by workers declines from 100% to zero. This agrees well with previous studies which, collectively, give an average of 22% of females developing into queens.
Subfields: Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics, Genetics, Insect Science
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ce7d131e0e74102080cb11d403a8165a52378271
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In Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics
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Citations in the corpus
- Reproductive decision-making in the termite, Cryptotermes secundus (Kalotermitidae), under variable food conditions (2004, background): “This is an exceptional Hymenopteran genus in which queens and workers are of the same size and are reared from the same types of mass provisioned cells, allowing any individual to decide for itself whether to become a queen or a worker (Ratnieks, 2001).”
- Conflict resolution in insect societies. (2006, background): “This occurs in the ants Pheidole desertorum (54) and Solenopsis invicta (90) and prevents actual conflict, as in the male-specialist colonies the workers do not have the power to cause a femalebiased sex ratio because of a shortage of female eggs, and in the female-specialist colonies the queen and ”