Honey bee queens produce a sophisticated array of chemical signals (pheromones) that influence both the behavior and physiology of their nest mates. Most striking are the effects of queen mandibular pheromone (QMP), a chemical blend that induces young workers to feed and groom the queen and primes bees to perform colony-related tasks. But how does this pheromone operate at the cellular level? T...

Studies of sex-ratio conflict in the eusocial Hymenoptera (ants, bees and wasps) have provided the most rigorous tests of kin selection theory. The hymenopteran haplodiploid system of sex determination generally renders workers more closely related to their sisters than to their brothers, whereas queens are equally related to their sons and daughters. Kin selection theory therefore predicts tha...

HERE are three castes in the honey bee colony: the drone, queen, and worker. T The latter two are both females. The drone bee is a male, representing a haploid gamete of the queen bee heading his hive. The honey bee colony is composed of two generations of bees. The queen bee is, in effect, a potent egg-laying machine, while the workers are morphologically and functionally fitted for honey and ...

The aim of the work presented here was to characterise proteomic shifts that occur in worker honeybees as they transition from summer winter. Label-free quantitative analysis performed on heads Apis mellifera collected July October compare proteomes bees colony progressed autumn. Analysis highlighted differential protein expression between emerged and hive (early late) forager bees, highlightin...

Changes in agricultural practices have lead to pollination deficits entomophilous crops, leading a growing interest supplementing farmlands with managed colonies of honey bee, Apis mellifera. However, the metrics colony as unit is controversial due wide range adult population sizes encountered colony, especially relation time year and beekeeping management. Correctly measuring number bees per h...

We report that the cells in a natural honeybee comb have a circular shape at 'birth' but quickly transform into the familiar rounded hexagonal shape, while the comb is being built. The mechanism for this transformation is the flow of molten visco-elastic wax near the triple junction between the neighbouring circular cells. The flow may be unconstrained or constrained by the unmolten wax away fr...