Fig. 3

Patterns of queen egg laying across the early nesting stage (Experiments 1a and 2). Figure shows, across the 45-day experiment (X-axis), the daily mean (+/- s.e.m.) number of new egg cups present in nests (Y-axis) for all queens. Queens are separated into two lines according to the experiments: Experiment 1a data are shown in red, n = 62; Experiment 2 worker + is shown with the small, dotted line, n = 10, and Experiment 2 worker- is shown with the dot-dashed line, n = 20. Regardless of the experiment, all queens had a pause period, although the timing varied. A boxplot showing the duration of the pause for Experiment 1a is shown in blue, with the minimum = 4 days (left whisker), the median = 8 days, and the maximum = 12 days (right whisker). Below, the typical development times of Bombus impatiens workers (re-created and modified from Cnaani et al., 2002) are shown to demonstrate how the development of the first brood in the nest relates to our queen egg-laying data