Authors: Ken Tan H R Hepburn Shaoyu He S E Radloff P Neumann Xiang Fang
Publish Date: 2006/04/01
Volume: 93, Issue: 7, Pages: 315-
Abstract
The development of animals depends on both genetic and environmental effects to a varying extent Their relative influences can be evaluated in the social insects by raising the intracolonial diversity to an extreme in nests consisting of workers from more than one species In this study we studied the effects of mixed honeybee colonies of Apis mellifera and Apis cerana on the rearing of grafted queen larvae of A cerana A mellifera sealed worker brood was introduced into A cerana colonies and on emergence the adults were accepted Then A cerana larvae were grafted for queen rearing into two of these mixedspecies colonies Similarly A cerana larvae and A mellifera larvae were also grafted conspecifically as controls The success rate of A cerana queen rearing in the test colonies was 645 surpassing all previous attempts at interspecific queen rearing After emergence all virgin queens obtained from the three groups N=90 were measured morphometrically The A cerana queens from the mixedspecies colonies differed significantly in size and pigmentation from the A cerana control queens and closely approximated the A mellifera queens It is inferred that these changes in the A cerana queens reared in the mixedspecies colonies can be attributed to feeding by heterospecific nurse bees and/or chemical differences in royal jelly Our data show a strong impact of environment on the development of queens The results further suggest that in honeybees the cues for brood recognition can be learned by heterospecific workers after eclosion thereby providing a novel analogy to slave making in antsWe are grateful to two anonymous referees for their constructive comments Financial support was granted by the Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden Chinese Academy of Science and the Yunnan agricultural University of China to TK and by the DFG to PN
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