Fig 1.
Bayesian consensus tree, graph modified according to Raffiudin and Crozier [15]. Species of the genus Apis can be divided into cavity-nesting bees, giant honey bees and dwarf honey bees. They respectively nest in caves or have open nests, where the colony is either attached to the bottom of the substrate or surrounds the branch they are attached to. Bayesian consensus tree was derived from the data set omitting the third codon position of the cox2 sequence. The credibility values shown were derived from 2000 trees after burnin. Trigona fimbriata, Melipona bicolor and Bombus terrestris are included as outgroups.
Table 1.
Sample size for intruder experiments.
Fig 2.
CHC profiles of pupae (unfilled) and foragers (filled) of the four honey bee species A. florea (circle), A. dorsata (square), A. mellifera (triangle) and A. cerana (diamond) displayed in a two-dimensional graph by non-metric multidimensional scaling (NMDS) of Bray-Curtis distances.
Table 2.
Permutational multivariate analysis of variance using distance matrices to test for an effect of species, developmental stage and their interaction on CHC profile composition.
Table 3.
Pairwise permutational multivariate analysis of variance using distance matrices to reveal differences in the CHC profile composition between the species-developmental stage interactions.
Fig 3.
Comparison of hydrocarbon substance classes.
(A) Relative proportions of hydrocarbon substance classes (alkadienes: dark green, alkenes: light green, alkanes: yellow, monomethyl alkanes: orange and dimethyl alkanes: red) in the pupal and forager stages in A. mellifera, A. cerana, A. florea and A. dorsata are presented. Each bar refers to one individual per species. (B): Cluster dendrogram of the forager CHC profile based on individual substances is shown.
Table 4.
Differences in mean (± SD) relative abundance of substance classes in the CHC profile of A. mellifera, A. cerana, A. florea and A. dorsata for pupae and foragers.
Fig 4.
Survey on the components summarizing species-relevant factors.
Honey bee species differ in their mean component richness and diversity (calculated according to Shannon-Wiener-Index). Additionally, abundances of single component are presented. The mean proportion of each component per species is given.
Fig 5.
The behavioral response of a colony to odor dummy.
The behavioral response of a colony (high-aggressive: dark grey: low-aggressive: light grey) to odor dummies is shown. Dummies applied with solvent served as control. Letters are indicating significant differences in the proportion of high-level aggressive and low-level aggressive colony responses achieved via post-hoc Tukey test. For all tests related to species x dummy type, 40 individual dummies were tested.
Fig 6.
Intruding attempts and acceptance.
(A) Differences in the proportion of intruding attempts (measured as the proportion of observed intruding individuals to released individuals) between nestmates and non-nestmates in A. florea and A. dorsata are presented. (B) Differences in the proportion of accepted individuals between released nestmates and non-nestmates and between species (A. florea and A. dorsata) are shown. Letters indicate differences in the proportion of accepted individuals achieved via post-hoc test (Tukey). The number of observed cohorts is indicated with n.