“…Indeed, there is ample evidence suggesting a trade-off between fecundity and longevity, energy reserves and starvation resistance (Grandison, Piper, & Partridge, 2009;Holliday, 1989;Leroi, Kim, & Rose, 1994;Partridge, Piper, & Mair, 2005). Interestingly, it has been noted that SHB can exhibit two distinct types of reproduction in association with honey bee host colonies: cryptic low-level reproduction, with few larvae present that do not harm colonies (Ouessou Idrissou, Straub, & Neumann, 2018;Spiewok & Neumann, 2006), and overt mass reproduction, with thousands of larvae often resulting in the full structural collapse of the entire colony in a short time (Hepburn & Radloff, 1998;Neumann, Hoffmann, Duncan, & Spooner-Hart, 2010;Spiewok et al, 2008). In the native range in Africa, mass reproduction of SHBs in association with local honey bee colonies is extremely rare (Neumann, 2017); low-level reproduction alone seems to be sufficient to explain local SHB population size (Ouessou Idrissou et al, 2018).…”