The struggle among social classes or castes is well known in humans. Here, we show that caste inequality similarly affects societies of ants, bees and wasps, where castes are morphologically distinct and workers have greatly reduced reproductive potential compared with queens. In social insects, an individual normally has no control over its own fate, whether queen or worker, as this is sociall...

We compared the mechanisms of resistance to Varroa destructor displayed by bees bred for Suppression of Mite Reproduction (SMR) and hygienic behavior (HYG). Mites from SMR and HYG source colonies were introduced into recently sealed SMR and HYG worker brood, and the infested pupae were placed either into recipient colonies or into an incubator. SMR colonies removed significantly more miteinfest...

Previous research showed that the presence of older workers causes a delayed onset of foraging in younger individuals in honey bee colonies, but a specific worker inhibitory factor had not yet been identified. Here, we report on the identification of a substance produced by adult forager honey bees, ethyl oleate, that acts as a chemical inhibitory factor to delay age at onset of foraging. Ethyl...

Honey bee colonies (Apis mellifera carnical, infested with Varroa jacobsonl were de-queened and divided into 2 subunits. Each pair of subunits were requeened with an inseminated A m capensis and A m carnica queen. The development of the mite population was monitored by determining the number of mites in samples of brood, and worker bees, and lhe number of dead mites on the bottom board of the h...

The waggle dance of honey bee (Apis mellifera L.) foragers communicates to nest mates the location of a profitable food source. We used solid-phase microextraction and gas chromatography coupled with mass spectrometry to show that waggle-dancing bees produce and release two alkanes, tricosane and pentacosane, and two alkenes, Z-(9)-tricosene and Z-(9)-pentacosene, onto their abdomens and into t...

Social evolution in honey bees has produced strong queen-worker dimorphism for plastic traits that depend on larval nutrition. The honey bee developmental programme includes both larval components that determine plastic growth responses to larval nutrition and nurse components that regulate larval nutrition. We studied how these two components contribute to variation in worker and queen body si...

Bee colony collapse disorder (CCD) is a growing threat to the efficient production of fruits, vegetables and nut crops, in addition to the critical role of bees as pollinators for numerous seed crops (Neumann and Carreck, 2009; Wines, 2013). CCD is characterized as a loss of adult (worker) bees from the hive that leaves the queen and immature bees (brood) inadequately attended even though there...

In a global transcriptome analysis of three natural and three manipulated honeybee worker phenotypes at different ages, we have investigated the distribution of investment in somatic maintenance of the fat body. Gene expression is modulated so that the bees are able to resist the most life-threatening challenges at the actual life stage. Different modes of maintenance and repair are regulated, ...

In many social insects, including honey bees, worker energy reserve levels are correlated with task performance in the colony. Honey bee nest workers have abundant stored lipid and protein while foragers are depleted of these reserves; this depletion precedes the shift from nest work to foraging. The first objective of this study was to test the hypothesis that lipid depletion has a causal effe...

Previously published data concerning honey bee metabolism, dealt mainly with adult specimens. In most cases, biochemical changes connected with the polyethism of Apis mellifera worker bees were described (Costa and Cruz-Landim, 2005; Elekonich and Roberts , 2005; Roberts and Elekonich, 2005). Little is known about the changes in the metabolism in successive developmental stages of brood (see Hr...