Queen and pheromonal factors influencing comb construction by simulated honey bee (Apis mellifera L.) swarms

The influence of the queen and her pheromonal signal on comb construction was examined. We tested four treatments with newly hived packages of bees containing: 1) a mated queen, 2) a virgin queen, 3) no queen but with a dispenser containing synthetic queen mandibular pheromone (QMP), and 4) no queen and no pheromone. After 10 days, the comb produced by each colony was removed, comb measurements made, bees from the comb-building area collected, the size of the scales on the wax mirrors of the collected bees ranked on a scale of 0-4 and the queens removed and analyzed for QMP components. Queenless workers built substantially less comb and the comb they did build had significantly larger, drone-sized cells than for the other 3 treatments, indicating that both cell size and the quantity of comb built are mediated through the queen, particularly QMP. The observations of wax scale size suggested that QMP influenced comb building behaviour rather than wax scale production. These results support the idea that queenless honey bees can adopt a strategy of constructing drone-sized cells in order to increase reproductive fitness through male production following queen loss.