Swarming and Mating

Abstract

To start a new colony, stingless bee queens need the help of workers. The first tasks of these workers are finding and inspecting potential nest sites, building nest-structures at the selected site, gathering food and defending the new home. Most details of this process are still poorly understood and there has been little research on stingless bee swarming and collective nest site selection since the pioneering work of Paulo Nogueira-Neto (1954). As a result, the internal and external conditions that lead to swarming, as well as the signals that coordinate this process, remain largely unknown. Existing studies do, however, show that stingless bees and honey bees have found different solutions for the same problem of establishing a daughter colony. Three major differences are the (1) reproductive status and age of the queen that leaves the nest, (2) the temporal dynamics of colony foundation and (3) the communication processes involved in nest site selection. The last two differences, i.e. the progressive colony foundation over an extended time period (vs. a single migratory movement of a compact swarm in honey bees) and the lack of an obvious recruitment signal (the waggle dance in honey bees), make swarming and nest site selection challenging to study in stingless bees.