Queen pheromones are essential for regulation of the reproductive division of labor in eusocial insect species. Although only the queen is able to lay fertilized eggs and produce females, in some cases workers may develop their ovaries and lay male-destined eggs, thus reducing the overall colony efficiency. As long as the queen is healthy, it is usually in the workers' collective interest to wo...

Conversation simulators are computer programs which give the appearance of conversing with a user in natural language. Alan Turing devised a simple test in order to decide whether such programs are intelligent. In 1991, the Cambridge Centre for Behavioural Studies held the first formal instantiation of the Turing Test. In this incarnation the test was known as the Loebner contest, as Dr. Hugh L...

Due to their haplo-diploid sex determination system and the resulting conflict over optimal sex allocation between queens and workers, social Hymenoptera have become important model species to study variation in sex allocation. While many studies indeed reported sex allocation to be affected by social factors such as colony kin structure or queen number, others, however, found that sex allocati...

In response to intraand interspecific competition, ant colonies have evolved mechanisms to maximize early colony growth. Through the analysis of photographic images, this study describes the individual effect of two different strategies, pleometrosis and pupae transplantation, on the growth of Lasius niger colonies. Results showed that both methods had an overall positive effect on colony produ...

The effects of sublethal pesticide exposure on queen emergence and virus titers were examined. Queen rearing colonies were fed pollen with chlorpyrifos (CPF) alone (pollen-1) and with CPF and the fungicide Pristine(®) (pollen-2). Fewer queens emerged when larvae from open foraging (i.e., outside) colonies were reared in colonies fed pollen-1 or 2 compared with when those larvae were reared in o...