Eusocial insect declines: Insecticide Impairs Sperm and Feeding Glands in Bumblebees

Primitively eusocial insects often lack morphological caste differentiation, leading to considerable flexibility in the social and reproductive roles that the adult insects may adopt. Although this flexibility and its consequences for social organization have received much attention there has been relatively little effort to detect any pre-imaginal effects leading to a bias in the potential caste of eclosing females. Experiments reported here show that only about 50 % of eclosing females of the tropical social wasp Ropalidia marginata build nests and lay eggs, in spite of being isolated from all conspecifics and being provided ad libitum food since eclosion. The number of empty cells in the parent nest, which we believe to be an indication of the queen’s declining influence, and a wasp’s own rate of feeding during adult life predict the probability of egg laying by eclosing females. These results call for an examination of the possibility that all females in primitively eusocial insect societies are not potentially capable of becoming egg layers and that reigning queens and possibly other adults exert an influence on the production of new queens.

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A monogynous eusocial insect worker population model with particular reference to honeybees

Insectes Sociaux ◽

10.1007/bf02223723 ◽

1980 ◽

Vol 27 (4) ◽

pp. 305-311 ◽

Cited By ~ 10

Author(s):

A. R. McLellan ◽

C. M. Rowland ◽

R. H. Fawcett

Keyword(s):

Population Model ◽

Eusocial Insect

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Strength surpasses relatedness–queen larva selection in honeybees

PLoS ONE ◽

10.1371/journal.pone.0255151 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 16 (8) ◽

pp. e0255151

Author(s):

Saad Naser AL-Kahtani ◽

Kaspar Bienefeld

Keyword(s):

Apis Mellifera ◽

Reproductive Success ◽

Eusocial Insect ◽

Preoviposition Period ◽

Queen Rearing ◽

Insect Societies ◽

Selection Of ◽

Colony Level

Nepotism was initially theoretically predicted and sometimes found to trigger the selection of specific larvae to be reared as queens in the honeybee Apis mellifera. Although the importance of selecting the next queen for a colony indicates that it should not occur at random, nepotism is increasingly considered unlikely in eusocial insect societies. Different prenatal maternal supplies of embryos have been found to impact fitness in many other species and therefore could be a possible trigger underlying the likelihood of being raised as a queen. We offered related or unrelated larvae from six colonies originating from eggs of different weights for emergency queen rearing in queenless units with worker bees from these six colonies. We showed that nurses did not significantly prefer related larvae during queen rearing, which confirms the theory that different relatedness-driven kin preferences within a colony cannot be converted into a colony-level decision. However, we found that larvae originating from heavier eggs were significantly preferred for queen breeding. Studies on other species have shown that superior maternal supply is important for later reproductive success. However, we did observe tendencies in the expected direction (e.g., queens that hatched from heavier eggs had both more ovarioles and a shorter preoviposition period). Nevertheless, our data do not allow for a significant conclusion that the selection of larvae from heavy eggs truly offers fitness advantages.

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Faculty Opinions recommendation of Social network plasticity decreases disease transmission in a eusocial insect.

Faculty Opinions – Post-Publication Peer Review of the Biomedical Literature ◽

10.3410/f.734480353.793553728 ◽

2018 ◽

Author(s):

Joël Meunier

Keyword(s):

Social Network ◽

Disease Transmission ◽

Eusocial Insect ◽

Network Plasticity

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Inclusive Fitness and Hamilton’s Rule

Social Evolution and Inclusive Fitness Theory ◽

10.23943/princeton/9780691161563.003.0004 ◽

2015 ◽

Author(s):

James A.R. Marshall

Keyword(s):

Sex Allocation ◽

Charles Darwin ◽

Inclusive Fitness ◽

Price Equation ◽

Additive Effects ◽

Eusocial Insect ◽

Hamilton’S Rule ◽

Biological Phenomena ◽

Inclusive Fitness Theory ◽

Hamilton's Rule

This chapter examines how the logic of inclusive fitness theory can be mathematically formalized using the Price equation, and how that formalization can be used to derive Hamilton's rule in its simplest form, as applied to unconditional behaviors having additive effects on fitness. Various biological phenomena, such as sex allocation and working policing within eusocial insect colonies, have been analyzed by considering what strategies maximize individuals' inclusive fitness, and how observed social behaviors should correlate with quantities such as relatedness. The chapter derives Hamilton's rule by introducing some notation for the effects of behaviors on fitnesses of individuals that interact socially, to make explicit precisely how genes (and later phenotypes) affect fitness, and to give a general form of Hamilton's rule that will apply to any (unconditional, additive) behavior regardless of its details. It shows that inclusive fitness is a genuinely novel extension of the classical fitness studied by Charles Darwin, R. A. Fisher, and others.

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