"A critical number of workers in a honeybee colony triggers investment in reproduction".
Abstract: "Social insect colonies, like individual organisms, must decide as they
develop how to allocate optimally their resources among survival,
growth, and reproduction. Only when colonies reach a certain state do
they switch from investing purely in survival and growth to investing
also in reproduction. But how do worker bees within a colony detect that
their colony has reached the state where it is adaptive to begin
investing in reproduction? Previous work has shown that larger honeybee
colonies invest more in reproduction (i.e., the production of drones and
queens), however, the term ‘larger’ encompasses multiple colony
parameters including number of adult workers, size of the nest, amount
of brood, and size of the honey stores. These colony parameters were
independently increased in this study to test which one(s) would
increase a colony’s investment in reproduction via males. This was
assayed by measuring the construction of drone comb, the special type of
comb in which drones are reared. Only an increase in the number of
workers stimulated construction of drone comb. Colonies with over 4,000
workers began building drone comb, independent of the other colony
parameters. These results show that attaining a critical number of
workers is the key parameter for honeybee colonies to start to shift
resources towards reproduction. These findings are relevant to other
social systems in which a group’s members must adjust their behavior as a
function of the group’s size. "
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| Frame with drone brood on the bottm |
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