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 ...

Reproductive cooperation confers benefits, but simultaneously creates conflicts among cooperators. Queens in multi-queen colonies of ants share a nest and its resources, but reproductive competition among queens often results in unequal reproduction. Two mutually non-exclusive factors may produce such inequality in reproduction: worker intervention or queen traits. Workers may intervene by favo...

Colonies of the primitively eusocial wasp Ropalidia marginata consist of a single egg layer (queen) and a number of non-egg-laying workers. Although the queen is a docile individual, not at the top of the behavioral dominance hierarchy of the colony, she maintains complete reproductive monopoly. If the queen is lost or removed, one and only one of the workers [potential queen (PQ)] becomes hype...

Social evolution in honey bees has produced strong queen-worker dimorphism for plastic traits that depend on larval nutrition. The honey bee developmental programme includes both larval components that determine plastic growth responses to larval nutrition and nurse components that regulate larval nutrition. We studied how these two components contribute to variation in worker and queen body si...

In an ant colony, the queen is the single reproducer and can interact with her workers via pheromones and cuticular compounds. However, in most species queen importance is not restricted to reproduction: in the initial development of the colony, her presence might play a more important role. In this work, we studied the effects of queen absence on workers behavior displayed in the foraging aren...

A natural river often finds good paths among lots of possible paths in its ways from the source to destination. These near optimal or optimal paths are obtained by the actions and reactions that occur among the water drops and the water drops with the riverbeds. The intelligent water drops (IWD) algorithm is a new swarm-based optimisation algorithm inspired from observing natural water drops th...

This paper presents the SIMD Phase Programming Model, a simple approach to solving asynchronous, irregular problems on massively parallel SIMD computers. The novelty of this model consists of a simple, clear method on how to turn a general serial program into an explicitly parallel one for a SIMD machine, transferring a portion of the ow control into the single PEs. Three case studies (the Mand...

in order to evaluate eight different protein sources in honey bee nutrition, some experiments were conducted as a completely randomized designs with four replicates and three steps incubator, field and overwintering in isfahan region. protein sources were lentil flour, soybean flour, soybean meal, bread yeast, wheat gluten, skim milk powder, fish meal and pollen. results showed that the longevi...

Consider the problem of using mobile agents within an e-commerce setting where the goal is to purchase a desired item for a user. The problem is that the mobile agents visit a collection of hosts which are untrustworthy and therefore could tamper with the correct execution of the agents. Our approach to the e-commerce problem prevents the hosts to retrieve the price the user is willing to pay f...