Abstract
During emergency queen rearing, worker honey bees (Apis mellifera) select several otherwise worker-destined larvae to instead rear as candidates to replace their dead or failing queen. This choice is crucial as the queen is the sole reproductive in the colony and her quality is essential to its success. Because honey bee queens mate with and store sperm from multiple drones, emergency queen selection presents workers with an opportunity to increase fitness by selecting full- (0.75 relatedness), rather than half- (0.25 relatedness), sisters as new queen candidates. Through patriline analysis of colonies along with large numbers of emergency queens reared by each we affirm the purported “royal” patriline theory that, instead of competing nepotistically, workers exhibit bias towards selecting individuals from particular “royal” subfamilies during emergency queen rearing events, Further, we show that these “royal” patrilines are cryptic in honey bee colonies; occurring in such low frequency in the overall colony population that they are frequently undetected in traditional tests of queen mating number and colony composition. The identification of these cryptic “royal” subfamilies reveals that honey bee queens, already considered “hyperpolyandrous,” are mating with even more males than has been previously recognized. These results alter our understanding of reproductive behavior in honey bees, raising questions about the evolutionary implications of this phenomenon.
Highlights
The fundamental problem in the evolution of social behavior, recognized since Darwin, is that group functioning is predicated on cooperation, with individuals often incurring personal fitness costs to assist their groupmates [1]
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript
Beginning 5 May 2015, each colony was split into one 10-frame queenright unit and two 5-frame queenless units each with eggs and young (0–2 day old) larvae suitable for emergency queen rearing divided between the queenless splits
Summary
The fundamental problem in the evolution of social behavior, recognized since Darwin, is that group functioning is predicated on cooperation, with individuals often incurring personal fitness costs to assist their groupmates [1]. This is perhaps best illustrated in the eusocial insects, where the vast majority of individuals within a colony often forgo individual reproduction to instead rear the offspring of one or a few queens. United States Department of Agriculture Agricultural Research Service, https:// www.ars.usda.gov/, DRT. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript
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