Asian honeybees parasitize the future dead

When a queen dies, unrelated workers seize the chance to move into her nest and lay their own eggs.

Abstract

The queen of a honeybee colony has a reproductive monopoly because her workers' ovaries are normally inactive and any eggs that they do lay are eaten by their fellow workers^1,2,3. But if a colony becomes queenless, the workers start to lay eggs, stop policing² and rear a last batch of males before the colony finally dies out⁴. Here we show that workers of the Asian dwarf red honeybee Apis florea from other colonies exploit this interval as an opportunity to move in and lay their own eggs while no policing is in force. Such parasitism of queenless colonies does not occur in the western honeybee A. mellifera and may be facilitated by the accessibility of A. florea nests, which are built out in the open.