A New Tribal Phylogeny of the Apidae Inferred from Mitochondrial DNA Sequences

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Abstract
The genus Apis (honey bees) has evolved some of the most complex social behavior of any of the Apidae (reviews in Seeley, 1985; Winston, 1987). Its symbolic dance language (Gould et al., 1985, Dyer, 1987) and polyandrous mating system (Page, 1980) are unique among bees. Two other behavioral features found thus far only in Apis mellifera, though little investigated in other species (but see Cameron and Robinson, 1990), are a hormonally driven age polyethism (Robinson, 1985, 1987) and a reproductive physiology that appears to be independent of juvenile hormone (Robinson et al., in review).