Worker honey bees undergo a socially regulated, highly stable lipid loss as part of their behavioral maturation. We used large-scale transcriptomic and proteomic experiments, physiological experiments and RNA interference to explore the mechanistic basis for this lipid loss. Lipid loss was associated with thousands of gene expression changes in abdominal fat bodies. Many of these genes were als...

Eusocial insect colonies form superorganisms, in which nestmates cooperate and use social immunity to combat parasites. However, social immunity may fail in case of emerging diseases. This is the case for the ectoparasitic mite Varroa destructor, which switched hosts from the Eastern honeybee, Apis cerana, to the Western honey bee, Apis mellifera, and currently is the greatest threat to A. mell...

Phenotypic plasticity is a hallmark of the caste systems of social insects, expressed in their life history and morphological traits. These are best studied in bees. In their co-evolution with angiosperm plants, the females of corbiculate bees have acquired a specialized structure on their hind legs for collecting pollen. In the highly eusocial bees (Apini and Meliponini), this structure is how...

In social insects, groups of workers perform various tasks such as brood care and foraging. Transitions in workers from one task to another are important in the organization and ecological success of colonies. Regulation of genetic pathways can lead to plasticity in social insect task behaviour. The colony organization of advanced eusocial insects evolved independently in ants, bees, and wasps ...

Drones are haploid male individuals whose major social function in honey bee colonies is to produce sperm and mate with a queen. In spite of their limited tasks, the vitality of drones is of utmost importance for the next generation. The immune competence of drones - as compared to worker bees - is largely unexplored. Hence, we studied humoral and cellular immune reactions of in vitro reared dr...

Nervous and neuroendocrine systems mediate environmental conditions to control a variety of life history traits. Our goal was to provide mechanistic insights as to how neurosecretory signals mediate division of labor in the honey bee (Apis mellifera). Worker division of labor is based on a process of behavioral maturation by individual bees, which involves performing in-hive tasks early in adul...

This review considers how a honey bee colony optimally controls the timing and type of new comb construction. Optimal timing requires bees to balance the energy costs of construction with the opportunity costs of lacking storage space during nectar flows. They do so by conditioning the start of building on (1) the attainment of a fullness threshold, and (2) the availability of nectar. A dynamic...

Varroosis, a disease caused by the mite Varroa destructor Anderson and Treuman has killed hundreds of thousands of Apis mellifera L. colonies in various parts of the world. Nevertheless, the damage caused by this mite varies with the type of bee and climate conditions. Varroa causes little damage to Africanized bee colonies in Brazil, as the infestation rates are relatively stable and low. We e...

Societies of highly social animals feature vast lifespan differences between closely related individuals. Among social insects, the honey bee is the best established model to study how plasticity in lifespan and aging is explained by social factors. The worker caste of honey bees includes nurse bees, which tend the brood, and forager bees, which collect nectar and pollen. Previous work has show...

We determined whether there is an association between nutritional state (as indicated by stored abdominal lipid amounts) and division of labour in the honeybee, Apis mellifera. We found that foragers (typically older bees) had lower lipid amounts than did nurses (typically young bees). Results from experimental colonies that contained nurses and foragers of the same age showed that the lipid de...