Meeting Abstract
Pheromones produced by queens are central to maintaining the characteristic reproductive division of labor seen in social insect societies. The workers who make up the bulk of these societies typically respond to queen ‘fertility signals’ by suppressing their own reproductive potentials and instead contributing to that of their queen(s), yet the evolution of these signaling channels given the potential for destabilizing dishonest signal production remains somewhat unclear. Fertility signal evolution may be at a nascent stage in primitively social insect societies, and the mechanisms enforcing signal honesty may be more readily apparent in these less derived species. However, little is known concerning the identity and production dynamics of chemical fertility signals in these species relative to their highly social relatives. We first identify putative fertility signals in a Halictid bee (Megalopta genalis) exhibiting facultative eusociality, a level of organization considered representative of the earliest stages in the evolution of complex insect social behaviour. We then examine the ontogeny, caste differentiation, and antennal sensitivity of bees to these compounds to assess their utility as reliable signals of queen reproductive potential. Finally, we compare socially-nesting versus solitarily-nesting queens from a single population to examine whether these compounds represent true, actively-produced signals or are instead constitutively produced cues of fertility.
