Male remating and its influences on queen colony foundation success in the bumblebee, Bombus terrestris

Abstract

-In most bumblebee species, queens mate with only one male, but males can mate more than once. However, the effects of male remating on colony foundation success of queens remain poorly understood. To test for effects of male remating, we assigned Bombus terrestris queens randomly to one of two groups: virgin males or nonvirgin males that have mated once before. When males were allowed to mate for a second time with virgin queens, 58.57 % successfully remated. There was no significant difference in queen hibernation survival between groups, but queens mated with non-virgin males were more successful in founding a colony, and produced more workers and males than queens mated with virgin males. The mean copulation duration for the second mating of males (48.02 ± 14.36 min) was substantially longer than for the first mating (32.44 ± 8.74 min). Results also showed that male weight influenced both male remating success and copulation duration.Bombus terrestris / mating behavior / copulation duration / male weight / colony development

No evidence for an inbreeding avoidance system in the bumble bee Bombus terrestris

“…However, the above-mentioned behavior of male patrolling cannot be observed in small experimental flight cages (Djegham et al 1994;Sauter and Brown 2001). Previous studies showed that mating success in confinement can be influenced by several factors, such as temperature, photoperiod, adult age and size, male dimension, and experience (Tasei et al 1998;Kwon et al 2006;Amin et al 2007;Amin et al 2010;Amin et al 2012;Gosterit and Gurel 2016). Evidence indicates that wild populations of B .…”

Bumble‐BEEHAVE: A systems model for exploring multifactorial causes of bumblebee decline at individual, colony, population and community level

“…We have described a new agent-based systems model, Bumble-BEEHAVE, rich in structural realism and mechanism that can be used to examine the effects of multiple stressors on bumblebee colonies and populations over multiple years, in realistic landscapes. It TA B L E 3 Results of simulations in a realistic landscape compared to empirical data from literature (Duchateau & Velthuis, 1988;Gosterit & Gurel, 2016). Mean (±SD) of each output per colony or replicate is given.…”

“…N replicates = number of replicates and compared to Knight et al (2005) Note. a Calculated from table II in Gosterit and Gurel (2016). b 6.42 days before eusocial phase.…”

“…We compared graphical outputs of Bumble-BEEHAVE simulations with empirical data at the individual level (Stelzer, Stanewsky, & Chittka, 2010), colony level (Duchateau & Velthuis, 1988;Duchateau, Velthuis, & Boomsma, 2004;Gosterit & Gurel, 2016;Lopez-Vaamonde et al, 2009) and at the population level (Knight et al, 2005). For clarity, we present the setup of the simulations in the result section.…”

“…Setting For colony-level comparison, we compared modelled colony investment in queen production and the days when colonies produced queens, switched to producing males and when workers started to lay their own eggs to data from Duchateau et al (2004), Duchateau andVelthuis (1988) and Gosterit and Gurel (2016) (n = 7,500 simulation runs, 365 time steps; Appendix S10).…”