Mating and Carbohydrate Feeding Impacts on Life-History Traits of Habrobracon hebetor (Hymenoptera: Braconidae).

Rapid population growth and wide host range make Habrobracon hebetor Say (Hymenoptera: Braconidae) highly suitable for biological control programs. To improve performance of the reared wasps in biological control programs we conducted a series of experiments on the effect of mating and carbohydrate feeding on life-history traits of this parasitoid. Mating caused a significant cost to fecundity, host paralysis and parasitism ability of H. hebetor. Mated wasps produced 30.98 and 23.2% less progeny than virgin wasps in unfed and fed treatments, respectively. Carbohydrate feeding increased survival only in the absence of host larvae. Virgin wasps produced only male offspring while the sex ratio produced by mated females was close to 50/50 for both fed and unfed wasps. Virgin wasps demonstrated an aggressive parasitism behavior and significantly higher paralysis and parasitism rates compared to mated wasps. Virgin wasps fed with carbohydrate found significantly more hosts than unfed wasps. To conclude, mating disruption in H. hebetor resulted in an aggressive parasitism behavior in the laboratory, which may also occur in the field. Therefore mating disruption is expected to improve the efficacy of these parasitoids in biocontrol. Carbohydrate feeding only improved searching ability and host allocation and could be applied in situations where hosts are highly dispersed.