Seminal fluid compromises visual perception in honeybee queens reducing their survival during additional mating flights.

ABSTRACT: Queens of social insects make all mate-choice decisions on a single day, except in honeybees whose queens can conduct mating flights for several days even when already inseminated by a number of drones. Honeybees therefore appear to have a unique, evolutionarily derived form of sexual conflict: a queen's decision to pursue risky additional mating flights is driven by later-life fitness gains from genetically more diverse worker-offspring but reduces paternity shares of the drones she already mated with. We used artificial insemination, RNA-sequencing and electroretinography to show that seminal fluid induces a decline in queen vision by perturbing the phototransduction pathway within 24-48 hr. Follow up field trials revealed that queens receiving seminal fluid flew two days earlier than si

SUBMITTER: Liberti J 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6739865 | biostudies-literature | 2019 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature