RESEARCH ARTICLE Mating Frequencies of Honey Bee Queens (Apis mellifera L.) in a Population of Feral Colonies in the Northeastern United States David R. Tarpy1,2*, Deborah A. Delaney3, Thomas D. Seeley4 1 Department of Entomology, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, North Carolina, United States of America, 2 W. M. Keck Center for Behavioral Biology, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, North Carolina, United States of America, 3 Department of Entomology and Wildlife Biology, University of Delaware, Newark, Delaware, United States of America, 4 Department of Neurobiology and Behavior, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, United States of America *
[email protected] Abstract Across their introduced range in North America, populations of feral honey bee (Apis melli- fera L.) colonies have supposedly declined in recent decades as a result of exotic parasites, OPEN ACCESS most notably the ectoparasitic mite Varroa destructor. Nonetheless, recent studies have Citation: Tarpy DR, Delaney DA, Seeley TD (2015) documented several wild populations of colonies that have persisted. The extreme polyan- Mating Frequencies of Honey Bee Queens (Apis dry of honey bee queens—and the increased intracolony genetic diversity it confers—has mellifera L.) in a Population of Feral Colonies in the been attributed, in part, to improved disease resistance and may be a factor in the survival Northeastern United States. PLoS ONE 10(3): e0118734. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0118734 of these populations of feral colonies. We estimated the mating frequencies of queens in feral colonies in the Arnot Forest in New York State to determine if the level of polyandry of Academic Editor: James C.