Behaviour and Genetics of Social Insects Laboratory, School of Life and Environmental Sciences, University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW, Australia.
School of Science and Health, Western Sydney University, Richmond, NSW, Australia.
Mol Ecol. 2017 Dec;26(24):6938-6947. doi: 10.1111/mec.14417. Epub 2017 Nov 24.
Functional worker sterility is the defining feature of insect societies. Yet, workers are sometimes found reproducing in their own or foreign colonies. The proximate mechanisms underlying these alternative reproductive phenotypes are keys to understanding how reproductive altruism and selfishness are balanced in eusocial insects. In this study, we show that in honeybee (Apis mellifera) colonies, the social environment of a worker, that is, the presence and relatedness of the queens in a worker's natal colony and in surrounding colonies, significantly influences her fertility and drifting behaviour. Furthermore, subfamilies vary in the frequency of worker ovarian activation, propensity to drift and the kind of host colony that is targeted for reproductive parasitism. Our results show that there is an interplay between a worker's subfamily, reproductive state and social environment that substantially affects her reproductive phenotype. Our study further indicates that honeybee populations show substantial genetic variance for worker reproductive strategies, suggesting that no one strategy is optimal under all the circumstances that a typical worker may encounter.
工蜂不育是昆虫社会的主要特征。然而，有时会发现工蜂在自己或其他群体中繁殖。这些替代生殖表型的潜在机制是理解生殖利他主义和自私在真社会性昆虫中如何平衡的关键。在这项研究中，我们表明，在蜜蜂（Apis mellifera）群体中，工蜂的社会环境，即工蜂的出生地和周围群体中女王的存在和亲缘关系，显著影响其生殖力和漂移行为。此外，亚科在工蜂卵巢激活、漂移倾向和目标宿主群体的生殖寄生方式上存在差异。我们的结果表明，工蜂的亚科、生殖状态和社会环境之间存在相互作用，这极大地影响了她的生殖表型。我们的研究进一步表明，蜜蜂种群在工蜂生殖策略上表现出显著的遗传变异，这表明在工蜂可能遇到的所有情况下，没有一种策略是最优的。
