Abstract
A BODY or surface (such as that of a worker bee or a cage) that has been in contact with a honeybee queen becomes attractive to worker bees1–3 due to contamination with queen pheromones3,4. Little information is available about the durability of those pheromones, apart from Butler's report that 30 min after removal of the queen a cage becomes less attractive to the workers, and loses its attractiveness entirely after a further hour1. I report here experimental evidence of a temporal decline in the attractiveness of tracks left on a waxed surface by a queen.
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References
Butler, C. G. Proc. The World of the Honeybee (Collins, London, 1954); in Sixth Cong. Int. Union Study of Social Insects. 19–32, Bern (1969).
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Gary, N. E. in Pheromones (ed. Birch, M. C.) 200–221 (North-Holland, Amsterdam, 1974); Science 133, 1479–1480 (1961).
Butler, C. G., Callow, R. K., Koster, C. G. & Simpson, J. J. apic. Res. 12, 159–166 (1973).
Juška, A. in Insect Chemoreception No. 2 (ed. Skirkevičius, A.) 193–202 (Vilnius, 1975).
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JUŠKA, A. Temporal decline in attractiveness of honeybee queen tracks. Nature 276, 261 (1978). https://doi.org/10.1038/276261a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/276261a0
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