By Marta Serafinko<\/p>\n
June 10 (Reuters) \u2013 Honeybee queens come from the same ordinary fertilized female eggs as worker bees. So how does one bee become a queen \u2013 with the responsibility of serving as the colony\u2019s only baby maker \u2013 rather than just another worker? Until now, scientists believed it was solely because the chosen bee was served a special diet.<\/p>\n
New research indicates that another critical factor \u200bis at play \u2013 the nature of the wax chamber built for her by the cadre of all-female worker bees. While these \u200cworkers provide the future queen a nutrient-rich substance called royal jelly that they secrete, the larval development chamber that they build for her also has unique physical and chemical qualities.<\/p>\n
\u201cA royal diet means nothing without a royal palace,\u201d said Kai Wang, a scientist with the Institute of Apicultural Research at the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences and one of the leaders of the study published in the journal Nature.<\/p>\n
Most of a honeybee nest is built from wax secreted by the female workers and shaped into neat hexagonal cells, \u200cwith some \u200bcells used to store food and others to rear offspring. But colonies also build a third \u2060kind of chamber for future queens, resembling peanut \u2060shells that hang downward from the comb. Long noticed by beekeepers as signs of swarming or queen replacement, they were often treated as passive containers.<\/p>\n
\u201cOur study shows it is actually an active, highly engineered \u2018smart incubator,’\u201d Wang said.<\/p>\n
The study focused on a species called the western honeybee.<\/p>\n
According to the researchers, the chamber built for the future queen offers a set of physical and chemical conditions that may help push development of \u200bthe larva in a royal direction. This wax is softer, melts at a higher temperature and releases a different chemical \u201cperfume.\u201d<\/p>\n
The softer walls may give the growing larva room to expand, while the scents could act as hormonal triggers, the researchers said. Even with royal jelly, Wang said, larvae exposed \u2060to worker-cell wax showed poorer queen development and much higher mortality, suggesting they need\u00a0the \u201csmell \u2060and feel\u201d of royal wax to survive and transform.<\/p>\n
The researchers also found that the bees that build the queen \u200bcells had unusually high thoracic temperatures and distinct gene activity.<\/p>\n
\u201cTo mold this special, high-melting-point wax, these young bees have to turn their bodies into tiny \u2018living furnaces,\u2019 \u200bheating their thoraxes to over 39 degrees Celsius (102 degrees Fahrenheit), like running a fever,\u201d Wang said.<\/p>\n
Wang said that these \u200cbees are not a permanently specialized caste, but \u201cordinary, flexible young workers\u201d taking on a temporary emergency job, with short-term shifts in gene expression that help them process the wax. Wang called them \u201cthe ultimate multitaskers\u201d because, while building queen cells, they keep performing everyday hive tasks such as sharing food with nestmates and inspecting other cells.<\/p>\n
What surprised Wang most was that the \u201cdeeply rooted dogma\u201d of nutritional determinism \u2013 the idea that feeding a larva royal jelly is the one \u2060and only secret to making a queen \u2013 was incomplete.<\/p>\n
The study, however, does not yet identify the precise aspect of the wax at play.<\/p>\n
Wang said the next step is to find the molecular switch: \u201cWhich specific chemical scent or physical touch actually tells the queen larvae\u2019s DNA, \u2018You are the queen.’\u201d<\/p>\n
Similar effects may exist \u2060in other social insects, Wang added. Termite mounds and \u200cwasp paper nests may do more than shelter their occupants, and the intricate wax nests of stingless \u2060bees could hide similar secrets regarding how colonies control their development.<\/p>\n
Beyond the biology, the work could eventually help \u200bbeekeepers breed healthier \u200cqueens, said Boris Baer, professor of pollinator health at the University of California, Riverside, and one of \u200bthe study\u2019s leaders.<\/p>\n
Queen \u2060production is central to modern beekeeping, and healthy queens are needed to maintain healthy colonies, Baer said. Managed honey bees pollinate more than 80 major agricultural crops, and Baer said better understanding how colonies naturally produce high-quality queens could help support more resilient bee populations at a time when beekeepers in the United States and elsewhere are reporting substantial colony losses.<\/p>\n
To Wang, the findings underscore the honeybee colony as a \u201csuperorganism,\u201d with bees collectively shaping one ordinary larva to become their future mother. As he put it: \u201cEating well is important, but living in the perfect home is what truly changes your destiny.\u201d<\/p>\n
(Reporting by Marta Serafinko in \u200bGdansk, Poland; Editing by Will Dunham)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"By Marta Serafinko June 10 (Reuters) \u2013 Honeybee queens come from the same ordinary fertilized female eggs as…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":262545,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[37],"tags":[9,24,63,122,124,123],"class_list":["post-262644","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-queens","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-nyc","tag-queens","tag-queens-headlines","tag-queens-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/262644","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=262644"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/262644\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/262545"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=262644"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=262644"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=262644"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}