Cuticular hydrocarbons(CHCs)play an important role in honeybees'nest-mate recognition.Apis cerana and Apis mellifera can accurately identify and expel non-nestmates to protect nest resources from pillaging,but they are relatively weak in recognizing new emerge bees compared with adult bees,even if they were not nest mates.In order to explore the phenomenon of different species of young bees in the colony that were not cleaned,the CHCs of young and adult honeybee of A.cerana and A.mellifera were identified by GC-FID and GC-MS.The peak area data of 40 identified substances were converted for principal components analysis,and six principal components with eigenvalues greater than 1 were extracted for discriminant analysis.The results showed that there were significant differences in the CHCs profile of the four types of bees.The results of Tukey HSD by Mahalanobis distance showed that the difference of CHCs profile between adult bees of different species was significantly greater than young bees,and the difference of CHCs profile between adults and young bees of the same species was small,which may reveal the reason why young bees are more acceptable to different colonies,and also improve our understanding of insect behavior and chemical communication.
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万方数据
