By Susan Milius
In a chronically tough job market for stingless bee queens, those with no prospects at home try stealing a crown elsewhere.
Genetic analysis reveals that even when Mom still holds the throne in a colony of Brazil’s Melipona scutellaris bees, the roughly 20 percent of her daughters who are maturing as candidate queens still have a chance to rule their own colonies, says evolutionary biologist Tom Wenseleers of the Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium. Excess junior royalty spreads out and on occasion manages to usurp other colonies of the same species, he and his colleagues report in a paper posted online the week of October 18 in Biology Letters.
Like their cousins the honeybees, the Melipona stingless bees of the tropics form highly social colonies where a queen lays the eggs and relies on her many daughters to do the rest of the work. But stingless bees go about replacing their queens in a very different way from the European honeybee familiar in North America, Wenseleers explains. European honeybee workers put a youngster on the road to royalty by expanding her nursery cell to queen size and feeding her what’s called royal jelly instead of worker rations. Honeybees raise few candidate queens, and only when needed.