The honeybee queen influences the regulation of colony drone production

Abstract

Social insect colonies invest in reproduction and growth, but how colonies achieve an adaptive allocation to these life-history characters remains an open question in social insect biology. Attempts to understand how a colony's investment in reproduction is shaped by the queen and the workers have proved complicated because of the potential for queen-worker conflict over the colony's investment in males versus females. Honeybees, in which this conflict is expected to be minimal or absent, provide an opportunity to more clearly study how the actions and interactions of individuals influence the colony's production and regulation of males (drones). We examined whether honeybee queens can influence drone regulation by either allowing or preventing them from laying drone eggs for a period of time and then examining their subsequent tendency to lay drone and worker eggs. Queens who initially laid drone eggs subsequently laid fewer drone eggs than the queens who were initially prevented from producing drone eggs. This indicates that a colony's regulation of drones may be achieved not only by the workers, who build wax cells for drones and feed the larvae, but also by the queen, who can modify her production of drone eggs. In order to better understand how the queen and workers contribute to social insect colony decisions, future work should attempt to distinguish between actions that reflect conflict over sex allocation and those that reflect cooperation and shared control over the colony's investment in reproduction.