After the emergence of the first or second group of offspring, workers take over the task of foraging and the queen spends most of her time laying eggs and caring for larvae.
They are characterized by a reproductive division of labour in which only a few individuals within a colony reproduce (queen/s, and king/s in termites), while the large majority helps in raising offspring (workers, in termites additionally soldiers).
Given the important effects that some of the viruses detected here have on honey bee health, including a large effect on winter mortality [ 25- 28], delayed negative effects on honey bee health are likely, particularly given the implied vertical transmission to offspring workers.
It can be expected that a replicating virus in honey bee eggs can have consequences for the development into a queen, resulting in a clinical relevance for queen breeding, and can also have knock-on effects after being transmitted to the offspring workers or drones [ 3].
Worker life-time efficiency in L. malachurum is about 3.2 offspring per worker [ 24, 43].
In workers exposed to extremely low-frequency electromagnetic fields, Irgens and researchers (65) found a slight decrease in the sex ratio for offspring to workers in smelter industries in Norway (SR = 0.99) compared to unexposed workers (SR = 1.06).
There have been inconsistent findings reported for the sex ratio among offspring to workers exposed to radiofrequency fields.
Though offspring of workers in the New York plant had a reversed sex ratio versus that observed in Indiana and Massachusetts, the PCB mixtures used in New York were similar to those used in Massachusetts; a more detailed analysis by type of PCB, however, cannot be performed based on these data.
When removing the derived clonal genotypes from our data set, heterozygosity, but not difference in allele size, was significantly higher in the worker offspring of the originally introduced clonal couples than in the worker offspring of the native sexual populations (Wilcoxon sign rank test: How: Z = 2.43; P = 0.015).
Here, using a cross-fostering design, we show that trans-generational immune priming in a social insect, similar to birds [2], takes place through factors in the eggs, with effects persisting into adult worker offspring.
