Talk:Megachilidae

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

	This article is within the scope of WikiProject Arthropods, a collaborative effort to improve and expand Wikipedia's coverage of arthropods. If you would like to participate, visit the project page where you can join the project and/or contribute to discussion.
B	This article has been rated as B-class on the quality scale.
Low	This article has been rated as low-importance on the importance scale.
Article Grading: The article has been rated for quality and/or importance but has no comments yet. If appropriate, please review the article and then leave comments here to identify the strengths and weaknesses of the article and what work it will need.

[edit] Sting? Reproduction?

Can these bees sting? Honeybee males grow from unfertilized eggs, those laid by the virgin worker bees. They are haploid. Are the males in these species haploid?

Megachilid females can sting, but rarely do (there's no colony to protect), and when they do, it is a very mild sting. Drone honeybees normally result from unfertilized eggs laid by the queen, not workers. The queen measures the size of the cell, and for the larger, drone-sized cells, she deliberately lays an unfertilized egg. If she is failing (running out of stored sperm), she may only lay unfertilized eggs in cells of both sizes. If she dies, or is removed, sometimes workers will lay, and the progeny will be drones because they are unfertilized, but they are generally malnourished, undersized, and not able to reproduce. Except for the south African race of bees, laying workers is the death knell for a honeybee colony. The exception is more complicated. Pollinator 02:24, Jan 29, 2005 (UTC)

OK, I was wondering exactly the same thing about the sting, but also, which kind of sting? Barbed or smooth? Since they'd been swarming all over my lupines lately, I considered doing a little empirical research in the garden to find out for sure, but I guess the results wouldn't be admissible in Wikipedia anyway, what with that "no original research" rule. And even if it is mild, it's still probably not a lot of fun (though I grew up helping my mother with her hives, so I'm certainly used to it!). -- John Owens (talk) 15:55, 2005 Jun 22 (UTC)

Answer: In all bees (and, in fact, all Hymenoptera species), males develop from unfertilized eggs and are haploid. This genetic system is known as haplodiploidy. These bees can sting, though the males don't since they don't have stingers (stingers are modified ovipositors).

[edit] Male Megachilidae commonly larger than females?

That doesnt look correct (as stated re Anthidium maculatum).
Goertz 19:39, 4 January 2007 (UTC)

I tend to forget when I write articles that everything is relative to one's perception, and I'm familiar with all of the world's bee species; large males are relatively common in Megachilidae (they're almost unknown in other bee families aside from Apis), just not in the more well-known groups like the genus Megachile - a lot of Anthidiines (which account for a fair number of species) have the males larger than females. Maybe not dramatically so, as in A. manicatum but larger, nonetheless. "Common" just means that it is somewhere between "uncommon" and "more than half". Maybe I'll need to simply choose a different phrasing to avoid confusion. Dyanega 21:09, 4 January 2007 (UTC)