Microbial pathogens are thought to have a profound impact on insect populations. Honey bees are suffering from elevated colony losses in the northern hemisphere possibly because of a variety of emergent microbial pathogens, with which pesticides may interact to exacerbate their impacts. To reveal such potential interactions, we administered at sublethal and field realistic doses one neonicotino...

in the present report, diagnosis and treatment of a case with follicular ovarian cysts in a 5-year-old persian queen cat is described. in response to palpation of spines, the queen cat presented herself in lordosis and danced up and down with her rear legs. trans-abdominal ultrasonography examination showed 2 cysts  in the left ovary of the queen. serum estrogen assay indicated elevated level o...

The modern queens maintenance systems are based on the use of artificial insemination, queens’ maintenance in the so called „queens bank” , in this way assuring an increased economic efficiency in beekeeping. This study aimed to compare the economic efficiency of the implementation of A.I. to various queen bees maintenance systems. Three alternatives have been taken into account: V1-a queen bee...

Reproductive division of labour is a hallmark of eusociality, but disentangling the underlying proximate mechanisms can be challenging. In bumblebees, workers isolated from the queen can activate their ovaries and lay haploid, male eggs. We investigated if volatile, contact, visual or behavioural cues produced by the queen or brood mediate reproductive dominance in Bombus impatiens. Exposure to...

Pleometrosis, or colony founding via multiple queens, occurs in a localized population of the seedharvester ant Pogonomyrmex californicus. In an apparently unusual secondary modification, queens of P. californicus are also obligate foragers; that is, queens must forage to garner the resources necessary to rear their first brood. Laboratory experiments measured the costs and benefits of pleometr...

Variation in queen number alters the genetic structure of social insect colonies, which in turn affects patterns of kin-selected conflict and cooperation. Theory suggests that shifts from single- to multiple-queen colonies are often associated with other changes in the breeding system, such as higher queen turnover, more local mating, and restricted dispersal. These changes may restrict gene fl...

A hitherto largely unresolved problem in behavioral biology is how workers are prevented from reproducing in large insect societies with high relatedness. Signals of the queen are assumed to inform the nestmates about her presence in the colony, which leads to indirect fitness benefits for workers. In the ant Camponotus floridanus, we found such a signal located on queen-laid eggs. In groups of...

The effect of different statuses of honeybee queens, Apis mellifera (one-year-old mated queen; supersedure queen; three-day old virgin queen; queen cell; without queen; and without queen/without bee bread) on many aspects of 3day old workers were studied with scanning electron microscopy (SEM). This study was carried out to describe the (types, distribution, numbers and measurements) of the dif...