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Degree-day accumulation controlling allopatric and sympatric variations in the sociality of sweat bees, Lasioglossum (Evylaeus) baleicum (Hymenoptera: Halictidae)

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Abstract

Halictine bees exhibit a wide range of social behaviour that varies both inter- and intraspecifically. Although previous studies suggested that the intraspecific variation might be attributed to temperature differences, there was no direct evidence to detect the relationships between temperature and socialities. Lasioglossum (Evylaeus) baleicum exhibited solitary behaviour in a cooler locality (Kawakita) because of the shorter breeding season; in a warmer locality (Nishioka Park), however, this bee species exhibited eusociality at sunny site and solitary behaviour at shady site, whereas a molecular phylogeny confirms that all of these colonies are evidently conspecific. Therefore, we examined the effect of degree-day accumulation on the sympatric social variation of L. baleicum by rearing the bees to calculate the threshold temperature. Whereas they showed high mortality, the threshold temperature was estimated to be 10.33°C and the expected degree-day accumulation was 340 degree days. When we use this value of a degree-day accumulation to estimate the expected eclosion date, the estimated dates were always consistent with observed eclosion dates. In any sites where the bees were solitary, the degree-day accumulation was not enough for the second eclosion by the end of the bee-active season. In Nishioka Park, sex ratio of the first brood was female biased, and daughters were smaller than mothers; in Kawakita, however, there was no sex bias, and daughters were as large as their mothers indicating that the foundresses seem to produce gyne-sized females in Kawakita but worker-sized females in Nishioka though these females do not become workers at shady site.

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Acknowledgements

We thank Dr. O. Tadauchi, Kyushu University, for his identification of our bee samples. We also thank Drs. O. Hasegawa, T. Kikuchi, M. Kidokoro and N. Azuma for helpful discussion and comments, and Dr. S. Kitanishi, H. Izumi, T. Kataoka and T. Sugimoto for helpful suggestion of molecular technique. We greatly appreciated comments from reviewers. This research was supported by the Ministry of Education, Science, Sports and Culture, Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (A), 17207003, 2005. This study complies with the current laws of Japan.

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  1. Graduate School of Environmental Earth Science, Hokkaido University, Kita 10 Nishi 5, Sapporo, 060-0810, Japan

    Masanori Hirata & Seigo Higashi

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  1. Masanori Hirata
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  2. Seigo Higashi
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Correspondence to Masanori Hirata.

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Communicated by R. Moritz

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Hirata, M., Higashi, S. Degree-day accumulation controlling allopatric and sympatric variations in the sociality of sweat bees, Lasioglossum (Evylaeus) baleicum (Hymenoptera: Halictidae). Behav Ecol Sociobiol 62, 1239–1247 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00265-008-0552-1

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