Department of Entomology and Plant Pathology, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, North Carolina, United States of America.
Interdepartmental Program in Biology, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, North Carolina, United States of America.
PLoS One. 2018 Jul 11;13(7):e0199124. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0199124. eCollection 2018.
During emergency queen rearing, worker honey bees (Apis mellifera) select several otherwise worker-destined larvae to instead rear as candidates to replace their dead or failing queen. This choice is crucial as the queen is the sole reproductive in the colony and her quality is essential to its success. Because honey bee queens mate with and store sperm from multiple drones, emergency queen selection presents workers with an opportunity to increase fitness by selecting full- (0.75 relatedness), rather than half- (0.25 relatedness), sisters as new queen candidates. Through patriline analysis of colonies along with large numbers of emergency queens reared by each we affirm the purported "royal" patriline theory that, instead of competing nepotistically, workers exhibit bias towards selecting individuals from particular "royal" subfamilies during emergency queen rearing events, Further, we show that these "royal" patrilines are cryptic in honey bee colonies; occurring in such low frequency in the overall colony population that they are frequently undetected in traditional tests of queen mating number and colony composition. The identification of these cryptic "royal" subfamilies reveals that honey bee queens, already considered "hyperpolyandrous," are mating with even more males than has been previously recognized. These results alter our understanding of reproductive behavior in honey bees, raising questions about the evolutionary implications of this phenomenon.
在紧急育王过程中，工蜂（Apis mellifera）会选择几个原本应该成为工蜂的幼虫来育成候选蜂王，以取代死去或失败的蜂王。这个选择至关重要，因为蜂王是蜂群中唯一的繁殖者，她的质量对蜂群的成功至关重要。由于蜂王与多只雄蜂交配并储存精子，因此紧急育王为工蜂提供了一个机会，通过选择全同胞（0.75 亲缘关系）而不是半同胞（0.25 亲缘关系）的姐妹作为新的蜂王候选者，来增加自身的适应性。通过对具有大量紧急育王的蜂群进行亲缘分析，我们证实了所谓的“皇家”系理论，即在紧急育王事件中，工蜂不会进行自私的亲缘竞争，而是表现出对来自特定“皇家”亚科个体的偏好。此外，我们还表明，这些“皇家”系在蜜蜂群体中是隐蔽的；它们在整个蜂群种群中的出现频率非常低，以至于在传统的蜂王交配数量和蜂群组成测试中经常无法检测到。这些隐蔽的“皇家”亚科的鉴定表明，已经被认为是“超多雄交配”的蜂王与更多的雄蜂交配，这比以前所认识到的还要多。这些结果改变了我们对蜜蜂繁殖行为的理解，提出了关于这种现象的进化意义的问题。
