Abstract
Stingless bees (Apidae, Meliponini), which areclose relatives to honey bees (Apidae, Apini) andshare with them a highly eusocial colonial organi-zation (Michener, 2000), are remarkable for theirhabit of producing virgin queens throughout theyear (Engels and Imperatriz-Fonseca, 1990). Mostof these queens are not needed for a colony’s sur-vival or division, however, and get executed sometime after their emergence (Imperatriz-Fonseca andZucchi, 1995). Only little is known about the mech-anism that releases the execution behavior in work-ers or about how a particular virgin queen is cho-sen as a new queen. Recently, we found that in
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