A single gene turns socially organized bees into social parasites

January 23, 2019, Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg

A small change in the genetic makeup of the South African Cape bee turns the socially organised animal into a fighting parasite. This change ensures that infertile worker bees begin to lay their own eggs and fight other colonies. In the current issue of the journal Molecular Biology and Evolution, an international research team led by Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg (MLU) outlines for the first time the genetic basis for this rare phenomenon.

Bees are social insects that live together in large colonies with a distinct social structure. Usually, roles are clearly distributed within a bee colony: In addition to male drones, there are numerous infertile female worker bees that care for the nest and provide for the queen. The queen is solely responsible for producing the colony's entire offspring, with the male drones developing from her unfertilised eggs and female bees from the fertilised ones. New queens only emerge when the colony divides or when the previous queen has died or is too old to continue to produce new offspring.

The situation is different for the South African Cape bee. Some of its worker bees are able to produce female offspring from unfertilized eggs. After the animals have been raised in their own colony, the false queens begin to reproduce more of their kind and can invade foreign but closely related bee colonies and ultimately take over their hives. The behaviour was first observed in the 1990s by beekeepers trying to establish the Cape bee in a region of South Africa where another honeybee subspecies lived.

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