Here we show that in a social allodapine bee the relationship between cumulative food acquisition (measured as total brood weight) and colony size accords with the CLT.
In order to examine whether sample size was sufficient to explain the outcome of the Shapiro-Wilk tests, we used a re-sampling procedure, which compared measures of normality for total brood weight in 1-female colonies with 2, 3 and 4-female colonies, larger colonies were not used because they were too few for meaningful comparison.
We measured brood care, alloparental brood care and reproductive success of all female group members.
The total number of eggs produced per 30 days was related to the proportion of total brood care that consisted of subordinate alloparental brood care (i.e., subordinate brood care / total brood care by female group members, summed over all broods during one sequence), using GEE and a log-link, corrected for group effects, scaling parameter adjusted using the deviance method [25].
Larger broods receive more care [23], therefore all brood care (maternal and alloparental care) was expressed as the proportion of the total brood care provided by all female group members.
To analyse the success of the brood, we included as response variables the size of the brood, and the average larvae mass (variable obtained by dividing the total brood mass by the brood size).
In uniparental species, desertion of the caregiver usually leads to total brood loss.
Furthermore, mated animals with larger broods move, pump, and live longer than those with smaller broods, indicating that total brood size in mated animals is predictive of somatic aging.
Our data are unlikely to be affected by biased sampling of progeny within broods (with respect to male order) or variable brood sizes, as there was no correlation between the proportion of the brood sampled and P2 (r = 0.15, d.f. = 21, P = 0.51), or between total or genotyped brood size and P2 (total brood size r = -0.03, d.f. = 21, P = 0.89; genotyped brood size r = 0.03, d.f. = 21, P = 0.91).
