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Molecular ecology of orchid bees

A range of microsatellite markers has recently become available, and we use these to address questions related to orchid bees fragrance biology:

1. Are female euglossines singly or multiply mated? Euglossine brood taken from nests was genotyped to assess female mating habits. I turned out that females of Euglossa are normally singly mated (Zimmemann et al. 2009). Knowledge on the euglossine mating system is essential to assess the potential for sexual selection to shape male fragrance collection.

2. How do the reported unusually high frequencies of diploid males in euglossine populations (Roubik et al. 1996, Zayed et al. 2004) relate to male fragrance collection? Males of two Panamanian species were genotyped to reliably assess the frequency of diploid (heterozygous) males. It turned out that males of those two species (as well as males of a large number of other euglossine species, Souza et al. 2010) had in fact very low proportions of diploid males (or none at all), i.e. they were perfectly "normal" with respect to male ploidy.

References:

Roubik D.W., Weigt L.A. & Bonilla, M.A. 1996. Population genetics, diploid males, and limits to social evolution of euglossine bees. Evolution, 50, 931-935.

Zayed, A., Roubik, D. W. & Packer, L. 2004. Use of diploid male frequency data as an indicator of pollinator decline. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London Series B-Biological Sciences, 271, 9-12.

Zimmermann Y., Roubik D. W., Quezada-Euan J. J. G., Paxton R. J.   Eltz T. (2009) Single mating in orchid bees (Euglossa, Apinae) and implications for mate choice and social evolution. Insectes Sociaux 56:241-249. PDF

Souza R. O., Del Lama M. A., Cervini M., Mortari N., Eltz T., Zimmermann Y., Bach C., Brosi B. J., Suni S., Quezada-Euan J. J. G. & Paxton R. J. (2010) Conservation genetics of neotropical pollinators revisited: microsatellite analysis suggests that diploid males are rare in orchid bees. Evolution 64: 3318-3326. PDF
male Euglossa imperialis pocketing fragrances
baiting orchid bees