We investigated the species-level taxonomy of the Malagasy Crematogaster (Crematogaster) kelleri-group and an additional more distantly related species of the same subgenus. Morphological data from worker, queen and male ants, as well as genetic data from three nuclear genes (long wavelength rhodopsin, arginine kinase and carbomoylphosphate synthase) and one mitochondrial marker (cytochrome oxi...

Interspecific mutualisms consist of partners trading services that yield common benefits to both species. Until now, understanding how the payoffs from mutualistic cooperation are allocated among the participants has been problematic. Two hypotheses have been proposed to resolve this problem. The Red Queen effect argues that faster-evolving species are favoured in co-evolutionary processes beca...

Were it not for the antiphospholipid antibody syndrome, the United States might now have a National Health Service. That’s my conclusion from finding direct links between the most prominent victim of the syndrome—Queen Anne—and current debates over Scotland’s imminent secession from England. This September, Scots will hold a plebiscite on whether to dissolve a partnership that has lasted since ...

Kent et al. (1) recently investigated genome evolution in the honey bee and proposed “strong links between recombination, biased gene conversion, GC-content evolution, and worker behavior.” However, we feel these connections may be more nuanced than suggested. Kent et al. (1) illustrated dramatically higher guanine and cytosine (GC) content for worker-biased genes than for queen-biased and dron...

iran, with a yearly production of 147,000 tons of plums, is one of the most important plum producers in theworld. this study was conducted to compare the phenological and pomological characteristics of 18 plum cultivars. an experiment was conducted using a randomized complete block design with three replications at the khorasan razavi agricultural and natural resource and agricultural research ...

this experiment was conducted to study the effect of plastic mulch on the growth and some physiological characteristics of two strawberry cultivars (paros and queen elisa) under drought stress. a factorial experiment was performed based on randomized complete block design with four treatments, including mulch, without mulch, normal irrigation (control) and deficit irrigation (-10 bar) with thre...

Odorant-binding proteins (OBPs) are small abundant extracellular proteins thought to participate in perireceptor events of odor-pheromone detection by carrying, deactivating, and/or selecting odor stimuli. The honeybee queen pheromone is known to play a crucial role in colony organization, in addition to drone sex attraction. We identified, for the first time in a social insect, a binding prote...