Abstract
The sex determination system in the eusocial stingless bees (Apidae, Meliponini) is based on the combination of alleles at the complementary sex determination (CSD) locus. In this system, males are haploid and females are diploid. However, diploid males can develop from fertilized eggs when they are homozygous at single or multiple sex loci. The production of such males can negatively affect population viability, since they are usually infertile or inviable. Moreover, when they are viable but infertile, or siring sterile triploid offspring, this could cause another load on the population, leading the fertilized offspring of other females to be only haploid males or triploid sterile daughters. In this context, our aim was to verify whether diploid males of the stingless bee Scaptotrigona depilis do in fact join reproductive aggregations. We showed that of 360 marked males from two different colonies, five were participating in a reproductive aggregation ca. 20 meters from their natal colonies. Using microsatellites markers, it was confirmed that three of these five males were diploid. They were captured in the mating aggregations when they were 15 to 20 days old. Further research is necessary to determine the mating success of stingless bee diploid males under natural conditions and to determine their impact on stingless bee population extinction risks. JHR 45: 125–130 (2015) doi: 10.3897/JHR.45.4769 http://jhr.pensoft.net Copyright Ayrton Vollet-Neto et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. SHORT COMMUNICATION Ayrton Vollet-Neto et al. / Journal of Hymenoptera Research 45: 125–130 (2015) 126
Highlights
The system of sex determination in the eusocial stingless bees (Apidae, Meliponini) has been shown to be based on the combination of alleles at the complementary sex determination (CSD) locus (Camargo 1979), like many other Hymenoptera (Whiting 1943)
Most of the time they are unviable, infertile or lead to the production of infertile triploid broods (Heimpel and de Boer 2008). They lead to the decrease of females in the population, since the diploid individuals were supposed to develop into females, increasing the extinction risks of the population (Zayed and Packer 2005)
Simulation models have shown that extinction risks increase when diploid males are viable and can mate (Zayed and Packer 2005)
Summary
The system of sex determination in the eusocial stingless bees (Apidae, Meliponini) has been shown to be based on the combination of alleles at the complementary sex determination (CSD) locus (Camargo 1979), like many other Hymenoptera (Whiting 1943). We investigate the fate of diploid males of Scaptotrigona depilis and aimed to answer the question: do diploid males leave their colonies to join mating aggregations?
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