Polyandry is the case in social insects, such as the honey bee (Apis mellifera) in which a female mates with many males. Many studies revealed polyandry give significant benefits to the growth and health of honey bee colonies. I hypothesized that cohorts of worker bees from a polyandrous mother will exhibit lower rates of mortality than cohorts from a less polyandrous mother. The objective of this study was to examine the effect of polyandry on bee mortality and to find out whether there is interaction between the level of polyandry and parasitic mite (Varroa destructor). My study found no significant effects of polyandry, mites, nor their interactions on survival time of bees. Similarly, there was no significant effect of polyandry on survival time of mites. These results are incongruent with other studies that indicate benefits of polyandry. I offer and discuss four explanations for these findings.

This up-to-date review examines key areas of animal behaviour, including communication, cognition, conflict, cooperation, sexual selection and behavioural variation. Various tests are covered, including recent empirical examples.

Apis mellifera L., the European honey bee, is a social insect that is vital to managed pollination services in the United States. Honey bee health and colony survival are challenged by the novel parasite Varroa destructor (Anderson & Trueman 2000). Honey bee queens are naturally polyandrous, mating with an average of 12 males. Hyper-polyandrous queens, created via artificial insemination, have shown increased resistance to Varroa mites. This project combined a hyper-polyandry treatment with a genetic treatment of bees selected for Varroa Sensitive Hygienic (VSH) trait, an additive rare resistance trait. The combination of these two intrinsic forms of resistance resulted in colonies with lower Varroa mite levels and these findings offer support to the rare-allele hypothesis for the evolution of extreme polyandry in honey bees. Additionally, an applied field method was evaluated to simulate the benefits of hyper-polyandry via brood mixing: the manual sharing of immature bees between a set of colonies to increase genetic diversity without artificial insemination. Brood mixing did not have a significant effect on any measure of colony strength and the lack of similar results to relevant tests of hyper-polyandry in the United Kingdom may be due to the homogeneous genetic structure of the United States honey bee population and indicates a lack of heterogeneous genetics when sourcing queen stock from individual honey bee queen breeders.

Explores the genetic and behavioral basis of kin recognition in social animals. This topic has wide-ranging and fundamental implications for evolutionary and behavioral biologists, since kin selection tends to favor the general survival of a group rather than its individual members, thus contradicting such basic concepts as natural selection based on survival of the fittest individuals. Provides an overview of the field in the form of an edited collection of review papers written by experts on the subject which reflects the indisciplinary nature of the field. .