Physical domination of workers by young queen honeybees (Apis mellifera L.; Hymenoptera: Apidae).

Abstract

Young queen honeybees go out of their way to walk over workers which sometimes flatten themselves as the queen crosses. This, other dominant behavior, and piping seem to help the queen win acceptance from workers. Queens occasionally sting workers. An hypothesis that is advanced to account for relation ships between queen and worker honeybees is most easily ex plained by a combination of selection at the individual and colony levels. The queen of many primitively social insects establishes or maintains her position in the society by the physical domination of the other females in the colony, but among the higher social species, pheromones from the queen are commonly thought to be sufficient to maintain the queen's dominant position (Wilson, 1971; Michener, 1974). The mandibular glands of the ma ture queen honeybee produce a secretion of 9-keto-fra?s-dec-2-enoic acid, 9-hydroxy-ira/?s-dec-2-enoic acid and small amounts of other lipids (Butler, Callow, and Johnston, 1961; Butler and Callow, 1968; Callow, Chapman, and Paton, 1964), and the tergal glands produce a mixture of compounds (Vierling and Renner, 1977); these substances, possibly together with other materials, inhibit the development of the ovaries of workers, prevent them from rearing queens, and serve as a queen recognition pheromone. Although pheromone changes affect the changing reactions of workers to queen larvae (Weaver, 1957, 1966), queen cells containing pupae (Boch, 1979), and ma turing adult queens (Butler and Paton, 1962), only changes with the age of young adult queens in the concentration of 9-ketodecenoic acid have been studied in detail (Pain and Roger, 1976). The queen honeybee is commonly believed to behave passively toward workers and to show aggression only toward other developing and adult queens. However, we have found that young virgin queens physically dom inate the workers, and that this physical domination appears to be an im portant factor in establishing the normal relationship between queens and workers. We observed that young queens sometimes seemed to go out of their way to walk full-length over workers, and sometimes they appeared Received for publication 20 October 1979. This content downloaded from 157.55.39.35 on Wed, 31 Aug 2016 04:11:48 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms VOLUME 53, NUMBER 4 753 to press down on the workers as they crossed. In normal colonies, though, workers are so closely packed that it is difficult to obtain objective mea surements of the frequency with which such crossings would be difficult to avoid. We therefore set up experiments to study this phenomenon.