In polygynous (multiple queens per nest) ants, queen dispersal is often limited with young queens being recruited within the parental colony. This mode of dispersal leads to local resource competition between nestmate queens and is frequently associated with extremely male-biased sex ratios at the population level. The queen-replenishment hypothesis has been recently proposed to explain colony ...

Queen pheromones are chemical signals produced by reproductive individuals in social insect colonies. In many species they are key to the maintenance of reproductive division of labor, with workers beginning to reproduce individually once the queen pheromone disappears. Recently, a queen pheromone that negatively affects worker fecundity was discovered in the bumblebee Bombus terrestris, presen...

Last year‘s COSIT, part of a conference series running (depending on who you ask) since 1992 or 1993, was held at the beautifully located Melbourne Business School at Mount Eliza, Victoria in September 2007. Official counting lists this conference as the 8th in line. It has been the first time that COSIT has taken place outside Europe and the USA. Still, with over 100 participants from all over...

1. In eusocial insects, colony fission is a mode of dispersal by which a young queen leaves her nest with some workers to found a new colony. In these species, adult females (workers and the queen) should allocate most resources to increasing their colony size, which constrains the possibility of fission. In contrast, developing diploid larvae should have a preference for becoming a queen and h...

Eliza Rybska, Zbigniew Adamski 2, 3 Antoni Wójcik and Jerzy Błoszyk 5, 6 The Faculty Laboratory for Teaching Biology and Natural Science. Faculty of Biology, Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznan, Poland, Electron and Confocal Microscope Laboratory/ Department of Animal Physiology and Developmental Biology, Faculty of Biology, Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznan, Poland Quantum Electronics Laborato...

power over nature, can work with natural means to effect cures. There is much that is theologically remarkable and psychologically astute, such as the description of the soul's desire for, and integral connection to, the body (chapter 4) or the account, which mingles physiological predisposition and psychological dynamic, of how anger rises from black bile (chapters 3.8 and 6.1). As Berger reco...

The Crematogaster subgenus Colobocrema was established to include the single species C. cylindriceps Wheeler, based on a single queen from the Philippines. We discovered a species close to or the same as C. cylindriceps in Borneo and provide descriptions of the queen, worker and male. This species lives in live climber plants of secondary and primary rainforests. The phragmotic morphology chara...