Level of polyandry and worker policing in giant honey bees, Apis dorsata Fabricius, 1793

Abstract

Worker policing in Apis dorsata was expected to be less effective. This due to the identical size and location of brood cells used for rearing male and female eggs. To test this hypothesis, microsatellite analysis was conducted using 4 polymorphic microsatellite loci (A14, A24, A88 and Ad3) to determine mother origin of drone brood in 4 colonies (n=660). The analysis revealed that all males are sons of queens not workers. In addition, dissection was conducted to evaluate workers’ ovary activation. The dissection showed that none of 1,902 workers studied has a sign of egg development. These results suggest that functional worker sterility is near universal in A dorsata. Worker policing in this species probably acts directly towards ovary-developed workers and this behaviour must only rely on pheromonal cues. Polyandry (multiple mating) in A dorsata was reassessed using 4 highly polymorphic microsateliite loci (A14, A24, A88 and Ad3) and relatively large sample sizes (n=2,696). These samples were collected from aggregated and singly nesting colonies. Microsatellite analysis showed that A dorsata queens have an extraordinarily large number of mates and this is the highest number of mating frequency in this genus. The mean effective mating frequency of aggregation was 64.11+7.39 and 62.14+10.27 in the samples from single colonies. However, no differences in the number of samples, the number of subfamily, the effective mating frequency, and the average coefficient of relatedness, were found between queens from aggregation and single colonies.