Abstract
Normal mating of honey bee (Apis mellifera L.) queens and drones results in extreme polyandry. Larger queens are reported to produce more brood, but do they also store more semen? Measurements of queen weight, spermatheca weight and volume, and numbers of sperm in the spermatheca were made on normally reared queens and queens exposed to miticide from early larval stage to emergence. In the normally reared group, larger queens had more sperm in spermathecae of greater volume and weight. The presence of miticide during queen development skewed the relationship of queen weight to spermatheca size and the number of sperm stored such that they were not correlated. This sublethal effect of miticide in the colony has an unknown impact on queen performance.
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