Social insects have commonly high abundances and an impressive role in ecosystems. For example, ants are key predators in many ecosystems and bees provide important pollination services. Moreover, social insects have always fascinated biologists by the complexity of their behaviour, division of labour and interactions between colony members. Behaviour of workers, which resign to own reproduction but help increase reproduction of queen is a challenge for evolutionary theories since Darwin and therefore the evolution of social behaviour is one of the key topics of evolutionary biology.
The most impressive are large societies, however, for studying the origin of sociality insects forming small societies and optimally facultative social species are better, where it is possible to compare different strategies between solitary and social strategies within one population. Ceratina bees are excellent model taxa for studying the origin of social behaviour and also the evolution of different types of parental behaviour. This genus have worldwide distribution and there are almost 400 species in the world. Traditionally they were considered as solitary, but there is growing evidence that most species are facultatively social with the ability of forming two female nests. Moreover, in several species not only females but also males in nest duration phase of provisioning brood cells can be present and parental care is generally very diverse.
The goal of this project is to perform a comparative analysis of behaviour of multiple species of Ceratina bees and infer evolution of social and parental behaviour from this analysis. The first step for this is to perform high resolution molecular phylogeny (based on ultraconservative elements), which is a prerequisite for the interpretation of evolution. The next goal is to collect natural history data about Ceratina nests, from which it is possible to infer social and parental strategies of the studied species. The last goal is to study within nest relatedness between colony members of facultative social species. Relatedness is supposed to be a key parameter influencing the origin of cooperation between individuals of the same species. The combination of all three goals together can uncover the evolution of sociality in Ceratina bees.
This project is mainly basic research, which is important mainly for better understanding nature, especially the evolution of cooperative behaviour. However, knowledge about Ceratina bees can be important for human society also in multiple ways. Firstly, there exist some parallels between animal and human behaviour and especially bees are similar behaviourally to humans more than many other organisms, e.g. by forming family-like structures. Behaviour of animals can do some mirror to human behaviour and therefore studying animal behaviour can be also beneficial for understanding ourselves. Moreover, results of this research can also have a positive impact on nature conservation. For effectively protecting species, knowledge about natural history is very helpful. Therefore, collecting natural history data about Ceratina species can help with their effective conservation.
