Abstract:
Workers of a queenless honeybee colony can
requeen the colony by raising a new queen from a young
worker brood laid by the old queen. If this process fails, the
colony becomes hopelessly queenless and workers activate
their ovaries to lay eggs themselves. Laying Cape honeybee
workers (Apis mellifera capensis) produce female offspring
as an additional pathway for requeening. We tested the
frequency of successful requeening in ten hopelessly
queenless colonies. DNA genotyping revealed that only
8% of all queens reared in hopelessly queenless colonies
were the offspring of native laying worker offspring. The
vast majority of queens resulted from parasitic takeovers by
foreign queens (27%) and invading parasitic workers
(19%). This shows that hopelessly queenless colonies
typically die due to parasitic takeovers and that the parasitic
laying workers are an important life history strategy more
frequently used than in providing a native queen to rescue
the colony. Parasitism by foreign queens, which might enter
colonies alone or accompanied by only a small worker
