4 Development and Reproduction
As in all insects that undergo complete metamorphosis, each bee passes through egg, larval, pupal, and adult stages Fig. 4-1 . The haplodiploid system of sex determination has had a major influence on the evolution of the Hymenoptera. As in most Hymenoptera, eggs of bees that have been fertilized develop into females those that are unfertilized develop into males. Sex is controlled by alleles at one or a few loci heterozygosity at the sex-determining locus or loci produces females. Development...
6 Floral Relationships of Bees
Wind and bees are the world's most important pollinating agents. Bees are either beneficial or actually essential for the pollination, and therefore for the sexual reproduction, of much of the natural vegetation of the world, as well as for many agricultural crops see Sec. 3 . The pollinators are primarily female bees, which collect pollen as the principal protein source in their own food and especially to feed their larvae. Flowers produce not only nectar and sometimes oil but also excess...
5 Solitary versus Social Life
Many works treat aspects of behavior of diverse kinds of bees. Specialized papers are cited throughout this book some more general treatments are the books by Friese 1923 , with its interesting colored plates of nests of European bees Iwata 1976 , with its review of previous work on the behavior of bees and other Hymenoptera and O'Toole and Raw 1991 , which offers readable accounts and fine illustrations of bees worldwide. A major aspect of behavior involves intraspecific interactions, i.e.,...
Preface to the First Edition
In some ways this may seem the wrong time to write on the systematics of the bees of the world, the core topic of this book. Morphological information on adults and larvae of various groups has not been fully developed or exploited, and molecular data have been sought for only a few groups. The future will therefore see new phylogenetic hypotheses and improvement of old ones work in these areas continues, and it has been tempting to defer completion of the book, in order that some of the new...