The family background of Agatha, the mother Margaret Scotland, is still one not yet fully clarified questions Medieval European history. Here, possibility that she could have been daughter Prince Imre, heir Hungarian throne, from Árpád and his wife, Romanos III Argyros, Emperor East Roman Empire, discussed.

Nepotism is an important potential conflict in animal societies. However, clear evidence of nepotism in the rearing of queens in social insects is limited and controversial. In the honey bee, Apis mellifera, multiple mating by queens leads to the presence of many patrilines within each colony. When the colonies reproduce through swarming, workers rear a number of new queens, only a few of which...

Mary E. Tinetti, MD; Darcé M. Costello, EdD, MPH, MBA; Aanand D. Naik, Claire Davenport, MD, MS; Kizzy Hernandez-Bigos, BA; Julia R. Van Liew, PhD; Jessica Esterson, MPH; Eliza Kiwak, Lilian Dindo, PhD

South American species in the seed-harvester ant genus Pogonomyrmex (subfamily Myrmicinae) are interesting biologically because of their numerous queen phenotypes and life histories. This paper provides a taxonomic revision and reviews the natural history for 21 South American species of Pogonomyrmex so that we can better study their rich and interesting ecology, life history, and evolution. Sp...

To date very few studies have addressed the effects of inbreeding in social Hymenoptera, perhaps because the costs of inbreeding are generally considered marginal owing to male haploidy whereby recessive deleterious alleles are strongly exposed to selection in males. Here, we present one of the first studies on the effects of queen and worker homozygosity on colony performance. In a wild popula...

Temporary polygyny (the presence of multiple queens) occurs in honeybee colonies when virgin queens (VQs) are reared for reproductive swarming or queen replacement. During these events, workers perform vibration signals on queen cells and emerged queens, and these signals may influence which VQ becomes the new laying queen of a colony. We examined the role of vibration signals during queen comp...