Fig. 2: The effect of chemical cues from diverse sources on worker ovarian activity in dyadic assays.

a Schematic diagram of dyadic assays to assess the effect of chemicals. FP: filter paper. b Average TOS of workers on original FP (n = 16) and odorless original FP (n = 20). c Average TOS of workers under three chemical add-back treatments (n = 16, 20 and 10 for new FP, new FP + pentane and new FP + original FP extracts). d Average TOS of workers exposed to new FP (n = 13), FP of paired workers (n = 10) and FP of two isolated workers (n = 10). e Average TOS of workers exposed to different doses of FP extracts. S5-FP: FP on which a single worker was reared for 5 days (n = 10, 11, 11 or 10 for 0.5, 1, 2 and 4 FP). f Average TOS of workers after exposure to different doses of the pentane extract of worker bees (n = 15, 9 and 10 for new FP, 1 worker equivalent and 10 worker equivalents). g Average TOS of workers provided with new FP (n = 15), FP of drones (n = 12) or gynes (n = 14). h Average TOS of workers exposed to pentane (n = 13) or crude pentane extracts of drones (n = 10) or gynes (n = 8). i Average TOS of workers exposed new FP (n = 9) or FP of honeybee workers (n = 9). j Average TOS of workers exposed to pentane (n = 13) or pentane extracts of honeybee workers (n = 9). All data are presented as mean ± SEM. Data in (b) and (j) were analyzed using two-way ANOVA with Bonferroni correction (two-tailed). Data in (c−h) were analyzed by two-way ANOVA (two-tailed) with Tukey's post-hoc test. In (j), TOS of worker α were compared by unpaired t-test (two-tailed) while those of worker β groups were analyzed by Mann–Whitney U test (two-tailed). Detailed statistical results and adjusted P-values for multiple comparison were shown in Supplementary Data 1. Source data are provided as a Source Data file.