A halictid bee with sympatric solitary and eusocial nests offers evidence for Hamilton's rule

Norihiro Yagi and Eisuke Hasegawa ()
Additional contact information
Norihiro Yagi: Laboratory of Animal Ecology, Graduate School of Agriculture, Hokkaido University
Eisuke Hasegawa: Laboratory of Animal Ecology, Graduate School of Agriculture, Hokkaido University

Nature Communications, 2012, vol. 3, issue 1, 1-7

Abstract: Abstract The validity of Hamilton's rule has been confirmed among cooperative breeders where helping behaviour is transient; however, Hamilton's rule has not been validated among eusocial insects where helpers commit for life. Here we conduct a direct test of Hamilton's rule using field populations of Lasioglossum baleicum bees, which inhabit sympatric solitary and eusocial nests. Our results show that the indirect fitness of sterile first-brood workers is higher than the direct fitness of solitary first-brood females, and spring foundresses achieve a large direct fitness by having helpers. These fitness benefits are attributed to markedly higher larval survival rates in multiple-female nests, and intruding into an unrelated nest yields a moderate degree of direct fitness, but coexistence with unrelated females also increase overall brood survival. We discuss reasons why various types of cooperation are maintained in Lasioglossum baleicum with relation to that how a multiple-female nesting improves larval survival.

Date: 2012
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms1939 Abstract (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:natcom:v:3:y:2012:i:1:d:10.1038_ncomms1939

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/ncomms/

DOI: 10.1038/ncomms1939

Access Statistics for this article

Nature Communications is currently edited by Nathalie Le Bot, Enda Bergin and Fiona Gillespie

More articles in Nature Communications from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().