Benefits of extended maternal care in a mass-provisioning bee at the cusp of sociality.

Many invertebrates exhibit parental care, posited as a precursor to sociality. For example, solitary foundresses of the facultative social orchid bee guard their brood for 6+ weeks before offspring emerge, when the nest may become social. Guarding comes at the fitness cost of foregoing the production of additional offspring.

Frequency and behavior of Melipona stingless bees and orchid bees (Hymenoptera: Apidae) in relation to floral characteristics of vanilla in the Yucatán region of Mexico.

Vanilla planifolia is native to the Mexican tropics. Despite its worldwide economic importance as a source of vanilla for flavoring and other uses, almost all vanilla is produced by expensive hand-pollination, and minimal documentation exists for its natural pollination and floral visitors. There is a claim that vanilla is pollinated by Melipona stingless bees, but vanilla is more likely pollinated by orchid bees.

Dominance of African racial ancestry in honey bee colonies of Mexico 30 years after the migration of hybrids from South America.

The Africanized honey bee, a hybrid of from Africa with European subspecies, has been considered an invasive species and a problem for beekeeping. Africanized bees arrived in Mexico in 1986, 30 years after their accidental release in Brazil. Although government programs were implemented for its eradication, Africanized populations persist in Mexico, but precise information on the patterns of genetic introgression and racial ancestry is scarce.

Cuticular hydrocarbon profiles reveal geographic chemotypes in stingless bees (Hymenoptera: Meliponini).

Cuticular hydrocarbon (CHCs) variation has been detected in various insect taxa, but the potential contribution of cuticular compounds for analyzing intraspecific diversity at the population level has been little explored. Here we assess for the first time intraspecific variation in the CHC profile of stingless bees, using the species Melipona beecheii and Nannotrigona perilampoides. The objective is determining whether intraspecific variation can be useful for population identification.

Phenolic Content and Bioactivity as Geographical Classifiers of Propolis from Stingless Bees in Southeastern Mexico.

Propolis collected by stingless bees is a valuable biocultural resource and a source of bioactive compounds. Methodologies to establish both the geographic origin and the potential pharmacological activity of propolis of stingless bees are required to regulate their sustainable use. The aim of this study was to classify propolis according to its phenolic compound content and potential pharmacological activity, using in vitro assays and statistical methodologies of multivariate analysis, hierarchical cluster analysis, and principal component analysis.

Pollination service provided by honey bees to buzz-pollinated crops in the Neotropics.

Generalist honey bees grant significant pollination services worldwide. Although honey bees can provide compensatory pollination services, their service to buzz-pollinated crops, compared to specialized pollinators, is not clear. In this study, we assessed the contribution of Africanized honey bees (AHB) and native sonicating bees (NBZ) to the pollination of eggplant (Solanum melongena) and annatto (Bixa orellana) in Yucatan, Mexico, one of the largest producers of these crops in the Americas and a region with one of the largest densities of honey bees in the world.

Anthropogenic effects on the body size of two neotropical orchid bees.

To accommodate an ever-increasing human population, agriculture is rapidly intensifying at the expense of natural habitat, with negative and widely reported effects on biodiversity in general and on wild bee abundance and diversity in particular. Cities are similarly increasing in area, though the impact of urbanisation on wild bees is more equivocal and potentially positive in northern temperate regions. Yet agriculture and urbanisation both lead to the loss and alteration of natural habitat, its fragmentation, a potential reduction in floral availability, and warmer temperatures, factors thought to be drivers of wild bee decline.

Sympatric cleptobiotic stingless bees have species-specific cuticular profiles that resemble their hosts.

Stingless bees are the largest group of eusocial pollinators with diverse natural histories, including obligate cleptobionts (genus Lestrimelitta) that completely abandoned flower visitation to rely on other stingless bees for food and nest materials. Species of Lestrimeliita are thought to specialize upon different host species, and deception through chemical similarity has been proposed as a mechanism to explain this phenomenon. In the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico, Scaptotrigona pectoralis is a species chemically distinct from, and not preferred as a host by, locally widespread Lestrimeliita niitkib; witnessing attacks on S.

Tragedy of the commons in bees revisited.

stingless bees display a paradoxical overproduction of queens, which are later eliminated by nest-mate workers. Mechanistically, it was suggested that the monoterpenoid geraniol deposited into newly provisioned cells by adult bees would cause larvae to develop into queens in . This system could be evolutionarily stable if many of these new queens were to leave the nest and parasitize other genetically unrelated colonies nearby, as was shown to occur in a congeneric species Here, we use microsatellite markers to test whether queen overproduction could be a strategy by which adult workers control the caste fate of the developing larvae to export copies of their own genes to the rest of the population via queen parasitism in .

Transcriptomic Signatures of Ageing Vary in Solitary and Social Forms of an Orchid Bee.

Eusocial insect queens are remarkable in their ability to maximize both fecundity and longevity, thus escaping the typical trade-off between these two traits. Several mechanisms have been proposed to underlie the remolding of the trade-off, such as reshaping of the juvenile hormone (JH) pathway, or caste-specific susceptibility to oxidative stress. However, it remains a challenge to disentangle the molecular mechanisms underlying the remolding of the trade-off in eusocial insects from caste-specific physiological attributes that have subsequently arisen.

Heat stress during development affects immunocompetence in workers, queens and drones of Africanized honey bees (Apis mellifera L.) (Hymenoptera: Apidae).

Though social insects generally seem to have a reduced individual immunoresponse compared to solitary species, the impact of heat stress on that response has not been studied. In the honey bee, the effect of heat stress on reproductives (queens and males/drones) may also vary compared to workers, but this is currently unknown. Here, we quantified the activity of an enzyme linked to the immune response in insects and known to be affected by heat stress in solitary species: phenoloxidase (PO), in workers, queens and drones of Africanized honey bees (AHBs) experimentally subjected to elevated temperatures during the pupal stage.

Patterns of sexual size dimorphism in stingless bees: Testing Rensch's rule and potential causes in highly eusocial bees (Hymenoptera: Apidae, Meliponini).

Eusocial insects offer a unique opportunity to analyze the evolution of body size differences between sexes in relation to social environment. The workers, being sterile females, are not subject to selection for reproductive function providing a natural control for parsing the effects of selection on reproductive function (i.e.

Developmental stability, age at onset of foraging and longevity of Africanized honey bees (Apis mellifera L.) under heat stress (Hymenoptera: Apidae).

Beekeeping with the western honey bee (Apis mellifera) is important in tropical regions but scant information is available on the possible consequences of global warming for tropical beekeeping. We evaluated the effect of heat stress on developmental stability, the age at onset of foraging (AOF) and longevity in Africanized honey bees (AHBs) in the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico, one of the main honey producing areas in the Neotropics, where high temperatures occur in spring and summer. To do so, we reared worker AHB pupae under a fluctuating temperature regime, simulating current tropical heatwaves, with a high temperature peak of 40.

Sweat bees on hot chillies: provision of pollination services by native bees in traditional slash-and-burn agriculture in the Yucatán Peninsula of tropical Mexico.

Traditional tropical agriculture often entails a form of slash-and-burn land management that may adversely affect ecosystem services such as pollination, which are required for successful crop yields. The Yucatán Peninsula of Mexico has a >4000 year history of traditional slash-and-burn agriculture, termed 'milpa'. Hot 'Habanero' chilli is a major pollinator-dependent crop that nowadays is often grown in monoculture within the system.

Comparative toxicity of pesticides to stingless bees (Hymenoptera: Apidae: Meliponini).

Stingless bees are potential pollinators of commercial tropical crops and their use may increase in the short term. However, studies comparing the toxicity of pesticides to different individuals and species are lacking, making it difficult to evaluate their short- and long-term effects on colonies and populations of these insects. In this work, we tested the lethality of compounds from the main pesticide groups on stingless bees of the species Melipona beecheii Bennett, Trigona nigra Provancher, and Nannotrigona perilampoides Cresson.

Comparative efficiency of Nannotrigona perilampoides, Bombus impatiens (Hymenoptera: Apoidea), and mechanical vibration on fruit production of enclosed habanero pepper.

The native bee Nannotrigona perilampoides Cresson (Apidae: Meliponini) has been evaluated with promising results in greenhouse pollination of Solanaceae in Mexico. However, no comparison has been done with imported bumble bees (Apidae: Bombini), which are the most common bees used for greenhouse pollination. We compared the foraging activity and fruit production of habanero pepper.

Behavior and pollination efficiency of Nannotrigona perilampoides (Hymenoptera: Meliponini) on greenhouse tomatoes (Lycopersicon esculentum) in subtropical México.

The acclimation, foraging behavior, and pollination efficiency of stingless bees of the species Nannotrigona perilampoides Cresson were evaluated in tomato (Lycopersicon esculentum Mill.) plants cultivated in two greenhouses. The greenhouses were divided into three areas of 16 m2, and one of the following treatments was used for pollination: stingless bees (SB), mechanical vibration (MV), and no pollination (NP).

Paternity frequency and maternity of males in some stingless bee species.

In monogynous hymenopteran societies, the number of mates of a queen strongly influences the potential for conflict between workers and queens over the maternity of males. Queens always 'prefer' their own sons to sons of workers, regardless of queen mating frequency. When a queen mates once, workers are more closely related to, and therefore are expected to prefer, their own sons and then sons of sisters to sons of the queen.