ABSTRACT
Three demographic features expected to influence colony reproductive rates in honey bees are worker bee development times, queen maturation rates, and egg laying rates. The temporal pattern of labor changes with increasing age mirrors the spatial pattern of work site changes in the life of a worker bee. The adaptive significance of the temporal polyethism schedule of honeybee workers was studied by determining the patterns of task performance probability in time and space for a variety of tasks. Numbers of eggs laid per 24 h for Africanized and European queens were not significantly different and were independent of worker bee genotypes. The missing of a haploid male worker caste as well as the extreme sex ratio in honey bee colonies are also signs for a successful queen strategy in Apis mellifera. However, in the regulation of queen number, workers sometimes kill gynes and pseydogynes that are their own siblings raised in the same nest as themselves.
