Reproductive and morphological comparisons of drones reared in queenright and laying worker colonies.

摘要

Drone honey bees (Apis mellifera) reared in queenright colonies (QRC), in drone combs (DC) and in laying worker colonies (LWC) both in worker combs (WC) and in DC were compared with respect to their liveweights at different ages, reproductive capacities, and morphological characters. Depending on the comb and colony type (DC-QRC, DC-LWC and WC-LWC), the weights of newly emerged drones varied. At emergence, the drones from DC to QRC were 17.0% heavier than drones from DC to LWC, while the drones from WC to LWC were 36.6 and 23.7% lighter than drones from DC to QRC and DC to LWC, respectively. The drones sampled from DC to QRC, DC to LWC and WC to LWC lost 18.8, 16.1 and 13.3% of their initial weights during maturation from emergence to 18 days old, respectively. The mean number of spermatozoa in drones from DC to QRC (12.01x106) was significantly greater than that of drones from DC to LWC (10.17x106) and from WC to LWC (8.62x106). The other reproductive and morphological characters, such as weight of mucus glands and seminal vesicles and extent of hamuli, lengths of hind leg parts, total length of hind leg and head width, were significantly greatest in drones from DC to QRC and least in WC-LWC drones. This led us to assign individual drones to three distinct categories: large, medium and small drones..