Figure 5.

Assay for worker preference for queen mandibular gland extracts. In order to determine if workers were differentially attracted to the mandibular gland extracts of the 4 different types of queens, we conducted a preference assay using the retinue response, as in Richard et al. (2007). One-day-old worker bees were reared in cages (30 bees/cage) in the presence of synthetic QMP until they were 5 days old. They were then presented with 2 coverslips with mandibular gland extracts from 2 different types of queens (0.05 Qeq of extract, the extracts were mixtures from 10 different queens; see Materials and Methods). The retinue response was monitored for each type of extract. Two trials were performed, each trial had 5 cages/preference assay. Significant differences in retinue response for each choice test were calculated using a repeated-measures ANOVA using proc MIXED (SAS, Cary, NC). Significant differences are denoted as follows: *P < 0.05, **P < 0.005, and ***P < 0.0005.