The behavior of each queen in a hive was monitored by a different observer.
Honest signaling of fighting ability by queens can be ruled out based on the peaceful behavior of queens in the ablated groups.
He recreates for us the complex infrastructure of the nest, describes the highly specialized behavior of workers, queens, and drones, and examines in detail the remarkable ability of the honey bee colony to regulate its functions according to events within and outside the nest.
Both, the frequency of queen - queen aggression and of grooming and feeding behavior of queens by workers predicted which queen later started to lay eggs.
Another possibility to explain the peaceful behavior of ablated queens is that they obtained information about the fighting ability of their opponents in an indirect and remote manner.
Subsequent social reinforcement of worker behavior often occurs via dominance behaviors by the queen or other workers [ 29, 30].
In addition, they presumably elicit rapid changes in the physiology and behavior of freshly mated queens, e.g., the shedding of wings, reluctance of mating again, and changes in cuticular hydrocarbons [ 34].
In reflection of this dominance ranking and the behavior of the female workers, it is seen that when a queen is no longer present in the colony, the next eldest worker becomes the new queen.
Because it is not possible to control the natural mating behavior of queens, we used instrumental insemination and compared queens inseminated with semen from either a single drone (single-drone inseminated, or SDI) or 10 drones (multi-drone inseminated, or MDI).
In addition, parasitism has not caused the mating behavior of V. squamosa queens to deviate from the high levels of multiple mating that typify Vespula wasps.
