was the first to establish that the development of honeybee larvae to queen or worker is not due to genetic differences, but is regulated by the differential nourishment that the female larvae receive from the nurse bees. Queen larvae are nourished with royal jelly, a mixture of hypopharyngeal and mandibular gland secretions. In contrast, worker larvae are nourished with worker jelly formed at ...

This paper presents a new approach to solving N-queen problems, which involves a model of distributed autonomous agents with artificial life (ALife) and a method of representing N-queen constraints in an agent environment. The distributed agents locally interact with their living environment, i.e., a chessboard, and execute their reactive behaviors by applying their behavioral rules for randomi...

Some of the most obvious complex adaptive systems are biological. A key concern in biology is how the overall properties of systems relate to the behavior of their components. Competition between these components in the form of an arms race, the “Red Queen effect”, for example, helps explain the trend towards more complex organisms, perhaps the most dramatic of macroevolutionary trends. The Red...

Body size and morphology are key fitness-determining traits that can vary genotypically. They are likely to be important in social insect queens, which mate in swarms and found colonies independently, but genetic influences on queen morphology have been little investigated. Here, we show that the body size and morphology of queens are influenced by their genotype in the leaf-cutting ant Acromyr...

Recent studies have provided a new perspective on the relationship between the honey bee queen and her colony. They suggest that the queen produces a pheromone which pharmacologically manipulates her workers.