Competitive males have higher quality sperm in a monogamous social bee.

Background: Reproductive success is determined by the interplay between mating and fertilization success. In social insect species with male-biased sex ratios and queen monogamy, males face particularly strong pre-copulatory sexual selection since they must compete with thousands of other males for a unique mating opportunity. Ejaculate quality is also expected to be under selection, because queens are long-lived and store sperm for life, so males with higher quality ejaculates are expected to provide queens with larger and longer-lived colonies, which in turn may produce more daughter queens (the only direct fitness gains of haplodiploid males).

Temporal Variation in Honey Production by the Stingless Bee Melipona subnitida (Hymenoptera: Apidae): Long-Term Management Reveals its Potential as a Commercial Species in Northeastern Brazil.

Even though stingless beekeeping has a great potential as a sustainable development tool, the activity remains essentially informal, technical knowledge is scarce, and management practices lack the sophistication and standardization found in apiculture. Here, we contributed to the further development of stingless beekeeping by investigating the long-term impact of management and climate on honey production and colony survival in the stingless bee Melipona subnitida Ducke (1910). We analyzed a 10-yr record of 155 M.