How is the female Yellowish Cuckoo Bumblebee's energy investment redirected compared to social queens?
It is redirected toward producing fewer, specialized, robustly built parasitic females.
The shift to cleptoparasitism causes a massive reallocation of energetic resources for the female parasitic bee. Unlike the ancestral social queen, who must allocate significant energy toward nest construction, foraging for pollen and nectar, and rearing a workforce of sterile females to support the colony, the parasitic female bypasses these steps entirely. Her energy investment is instead concentrated on producing a smaller number of progeny that are highly specialized for their parasitic role. This redirection ensures that the energy saved from colony maintenance is focused on maximizing the survival assurance of her single egg via hijacking an existing nursery, representing a high-risk, high-reward evolutionary strategy.
