wlhunt{at}earthlink.net (William L Hunt) wrote in news:bs78kk$2a88$1
{at}darwin.ediacara.org:

> On Fri, 19 Dec 2003 16:43:38 +0000 (UTC), "Anon."
>  wrote:
> 
>>William L Hunt wrote:
>>>  Does anyone (Edser?) think that self-determination of caste is NOT
>>> occurring in the Melopine stingless bees?

>>Nothing you wrote seems to rule out maternal effects - i.e. it's the 
>>queen who's determining caste.  You can then explain the excess females 
>>as bet-hedging, as their caste is determined some time before hatching.

>>Just an alternative hypothesis.

>  Well, both the queen and the workers should have the same interest
> here in maximizing the hive efficiency by producing only queens as
> needed with maybe just a little "bet-hedging". Other hive swarming
> species do produce a small excess over what is needed ("bet-hedging")
> but nothing like the excess seen in Melipona.
>   I made this post hoping to get a response from John Edser. From his
> logic he reasons that a sterility gene(s) cannot be selected.
> Self-determination of caste requires that this is, in fact, happening.
> Maybe I should have made this clearer to provoke a response from
> Edser.
>  I can picture Melapine bees buzzing Edser and telling him to take a
> look at our larva. They are determining their own caste fate and
> choosing sterility 75+ percent of the time. They have been doing this
> for millions of years. Surely sterility is being selected. This is not
> mutualism. The larva are acting in their own self-interest, the only
> reason they all don't become queens is that there must be some
> "choosing" to be workers to form the swarm that is required to found a
> hive. A queen cannot found a hive by herself; no workers and everyone
> dies. The question might be how does one predict what this optimal
> percentage is? These prediction formula have been derived by various
> methods and they all will have a mention of the name Hamiltion and
> relatedness r values. In fact, the formula is just: percentage of
> larva becoming queens P=(1 - Rf)/(1 + Rm) where Rf is relatedness of
> larva to sister and Rm is relatedness of larva to male. Melopines are
> always single mated, so Rf= .75 and Rm ranges from .25 to .75
> depending on species. So the predicted P% is 14% - 20%.
(snip)
>  In any case, I think some lab will eventually find the allelic
> mechanism and that should end any questions of whether it really is
> self-determination that is happening.


To be charitable, John Edser may not have seen this particular follow - I 
often find that stuff on newsgroups disappears from some ISP's and/or 
newsreaders. To be uncharitable, Edser doesn't particularly like to 
respond to real research - it often fails to correspond to what must be 
true according to his logic.


But my question is, how did this behavior evolve in the first place? 
Granted that self-determination is happening, how would you start to 
select it? In most of the examples of kin helping that I have seen, the 
involved entities still retain their fertility. So you can see how they 
can sort of "slip into" kin selection. In the case of the bees, it would 
seem there would never be an initial advantage to choosing sterility, 
even though there might be an advantage in choosing not to reproduce. It 
would seem that the self-determination would have to be a trait derived 
from a previous "standard" bee. The way I can see this working is if it 
was frequently true that hives were started with a small number of bees 
and that the original queen frequently died.

If on the other hand Melapine bees are the ancestral condition and other 
bees the "derived" condition, I would think there would have to be some 
additional cost in being a queen, so that choosing sterility would be 
similar to menopause in humans. But I thought that bee queens live 
longer, not shorter, than sterile workes. Of course, as I know little 
about bees and nothing about Melapine bees, I would not be surprised to 
find that I am way off base on the above.   


Yours,

Bill Morse
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