Elsevier

Animal Behaviour

Volume 86, Issue 3, September 2013, Pages 603-609
Animal Behaviour

Sneaky queens in Melipona bees selectively detect and infiltrate queenless colonies

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.anbehav.2013.07.001Get rights and content

Highlights

  • •

    We demonstrate the occurrence of intraspecific queen parasitism using RFID tags.

  • •

    Solitary queens selectively seek out queenless colonies to reproduce in.

  • •

    Guarding of queenright and queenless colonies is shown to be equally efficient.

  • •

    Solitary nest-seeking queens exclusively enter colonies around sunset.

  • •

    We demonstrate that guarding efficiency is at its lowest around sunset.

Insect societies are characterized by advanced cooperation, but at the same time the complexity of their colonies renders them susceptible to reproductive parasitism. Recently, a genetic study on the Brazilian stingless bee Melipona scutellaris showed that unrelated queens frequently invade and take over colonies in which the mother queen had died. In the present study, we investigated this phenomenon using radio frequency identification (RFID) tags. We confirmed that alien queen take-overs are common within this species, and demonstrated that mated queens actively seek out colonies without a queen to reproduce in. Furthermore, we found that queens only penetrate their target colonies in the evening, when guarding efficiency is significantly reduced. We hypothesize that this strategy reduces the chance of the queens being attacked by entrance guards, thus maximizing their chance of successful infiltration.

Section snippets

Incidence of Queen Parasitism

To assess the incidence of intraspecific queen parasitism in M. scutellaris, we monitored eight colonies in the Laboratory of Ecology and Behaviour of Social Insects at the University of São Paulo (Ribeirão Preto city, Brazil) in February and March 2012. Permission to conduct our research was granted by the Brazilian Ministry of Environment under permit 12BR008955/DF. Melipona scutellaris is a tree dweller that nests in tree hollows and occurs naturally in the north and northeast of Brazil (

Results

During the timeframe of our study, five of 520 tagged virgin queens were found to return successfully to the test colonies after mating. In addition, five untagged queens were found to have successfully established themselves in our test colonies. In one case, one tagged queen tried to penetrate two different colonies, and succeeded in doing so during her last attempt (Table 1). The number of tagged virgin queens leaving the colony was relatively low at just over 45% on average. This may be

Discussion

Our study confirms that queen parasitism is common in the stingless bee M. scutellaris, with 37.5% of the successful take-overs being undertaken by unrelated queens, which is consistent with an earlier genetic study on queen parasitism in this species (Wenseleers et al. 2011). The frequent occurrence of queen parasitism implies that this alternative reproductive strategy might be employed relatively often by lone nest-searching queens. In addition, we demonstrate that M. scutellaris queens can

Acknowledgments

This work was supported financially by the FWO-Flanders, FAPESP (grant numbers 2010/19717-4 to D.A.A., 2010/10027-5 to F.S.N. and 2011/21084-2 to T.W.), the Research Center on Biodiversity and Computing (BioComp) of the Universidade de São Paulo (USP), supported by the USP Provost's Office for Research, and the Royal Belgian Entomological Society (poster prize to A.V.O.). We are grateful to Edgar Duéñez-Guzmán for his helpful comments on the manuscript. We appreciate the useful comments of two

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