t Social insects have evolved highly developed
communication systems, enabling them to coordinate complex
interactions in their colonies. Pheromones play a major
role in the coordination of many tasks. In Trigona corvina, a
stingless bee that occurs in Central America, foragers use
pheromones produced in their labial glands to scent mark
solid substrates between a food source and their nest. Newly
recruited bees subsequently follow these scent marks until
they reach the food source. A recent study has revealed nestspecific
differences in the composition of these trail pheromones
in colonies of T. corvina, suggesting that pheromone
specificity may serve to avoid competition between foragers
from different nests. However, the nests used in this study
came from different populations and their foragers certainly
never met in the field (Jarau et al., 2010). The aim of the
present study was to investigate whether differences in the
trail pheromones of foragers from different nests can also be
found between neighbouring colonies within populations.
We analysed the composition of trail pheromones from labial
gland secretions extracted from workers from nine colonies
collected at three different populations in Costa Rica. The
differences in pheromone composition were even more
distinct between neighbouring nests within a population than
between nests of different populations. This finding corroborates
the hypothesis that nest specificity of trail pheromones
serves to communicate the location of a food source exclusively
to nestmates, thereby avoiding intraspecific competition
at resources. Resource partitioning by avoiding conspecific
non-nestmates is particularly adaptive for aggressive bee
species, such as T. corvina