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The queen of a honeybee colony has a reproductive monopoly because her workers' ovaries are normally inactive and any eggs that they do lay are eaten by their fellow workers. But if a colony becomes queenless, the workers start to lay eggs, stop policing and rear a last batch of males before the colony finally dies out. Here we show that workers of the Asian dwarf red honeybee Apis florea from other colonies exploit this interval as an opportunity to move in and lay their own eggs while no policing is in force. Such parasitism of queenless colonies does not occur in the western honeybee A. mellifera and may be facilitated by the accessibility of A. florea nests, which are built out in the open.

We examined worker reproduction in queenless and queenright Apis cerana colonies to determine if they are parasitized by workers from other nests. The results demonstrate that 2-6% of workers in queenright colonies are from another nest (non-natal), but these workers are not statistically more likely to have activated ovaries than natal workers, and are therefore unlikely to be active parasites. However, in queenless colonies we found a significant difference between the proportion of non-natal (72.7%) and natal (36.3%) workers with activated ovaries. Non-natal workers also had significantly higher reproductive success than natal workers: 1.8% of workers were non-natal, but these laid 5.2% of the eggs and produced 5.5% of the pupae. Unlike A. florea, the proportion of non-natal workers does not increase in queenless nests.

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