Correlation between Body Weight and Colony Development of the Bumblebee Queen, Bombus ignitus

  • Yoon, Hyung Joo (Department of Agricultural Biology, The National Institute of Agricultural Science & Technology) ;
  • Kim, Sam Eun (Department of Agricultural Biology, The National Institute of Agricultural Science & Technology) ;
  • Lee, Sang Beom (Department of Agricultural Biology, The National Institute of Agricultural Science & Technology) ;
  • Park, In Gyun (Department of Agricultural Biology, The National Institute of Agricultural Science & Technology) ;
  • Seol, Kwang Youl (Department of Agricultural Biology, The National Institute of Agricultural Science & Technology)
  • Published : 2004.09.01

Abstract

This study was carried out to investigate the effect of body weight of queen on the developmental characteristics of foundation queens in the Bombus ignitus collected in Korean locality. Queens were classified into six groups based on their body weight (i.e., 0.4 g, 0.5 g, 0.6 g, 0.7 g, 0.8 g and 0.9 g). The average weight of 200 foundation queens collected was 0.657${\times}40.095 g and 0.6 g-class was most abundant (38 %) among six weight classes. The queen that had the heavy body weight showed the trends of higher rate of oviposition, colony foundation and progeny-queen production and shorter periods of preoviposition and colony foundation, suggesting the positive correlation between the body weight of queen and colony developmental characteristics. Also, the numbers of worker and progeny-queen emerged from the queen with heavy body weight were slightly higher than those with light body weight queen.

Keywords

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