Enhanced Royal Jelly Produces Jumbo Queen Bee Larvae

ScienceDaily (July 18, 2012) — Scientists have discovered a way to make worker bees produce an enhanced version of royal jelly (RJ) -- the super-nutritious substance that dictates whether larvae become workers or queens, and that is also renowned as a health supplement for people.

Their study, which found that the super RJ that makes queen bee larvae grow 2-3 times larger than normal, appears in ACS' Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry.

Chia-Nan Chen and colleagues explain that royal jelly is a thick liquid made up of proteins, sugars and fats that is secreted by glands in the throats and jaws of worker bees and fed to larvae. Workers feed all bee larvae RJ for the first three days of their lives, but only the queen gets it throughout life, growing larger and living up to 15 times longer than other bees. The scientists treated worker bees with drugs called histone deacetylase inhibitors (HDACis) to see whether they could enhance the larvae's growth.

They found that worker bees given HDACis produced a fortified royal jelly that made the queen bee larvae grow to be 2-3 times larger than larvae fed standard royal jelly. A couple HDACis have already been approved for treating certain forms of cancer. The scientists noted that this is the first study showing that the composition of RJ can be modified in a way that changes the body size of queen bees during development.

ournal Reference:

1. Chung-Yang Huang, Li-Ling Chi, Wei-Jan Huang, Yue-Wen Chen, Wei-Jung Chen, Yu-Cheng Kuo, Cheng Mike Yuan, Chia-Nan Chen. Growth Stimulating Effect on Queen Bee Larvae of Histone Deacetylase Inhibitors. Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry, 2012; : 120607142036004 DOI: 10.1021/jf300815b

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/07/120718143917.htm

Family disputes create rebel bees

Worker bees rebel when faced with the prospect of raising their nephews and nieces, research has found.

Scientists in Poland have studied post-swarm bee colonies to understand how workers react to a change in queen.

They discovered that when a daughter replaces her mother as head of the colony, some worker bees reproduce instead of caring for their monarch's offspring.

The findings are published in the journal Current Biology.

Prof Michal Woyciechowski from the Institute of Environmental Sciences at Jagiellonian University in Poland led the research.

In a honey bee colony there is a single fertile queen and thousands of fertile male drones, all supported by the queen's sterile daughters, which are known as workers.

Swarming is a natural occurrence in which the queen and part of her colony leave en masse to find a new nest site.

Before she leaves, the queen bee lays a number of eggs, one of which will develop into a new fertile queen supported by the remaining workers.

In this case, Prof Woyciechowski explained, rather than rearing their brothers and sisters, "workers are obligated to rear nieces and nephews".

"This drop in relatedness causes the old queen's workers to lay their own eggs."

Read more:  http://www.bbc.co.uk/nature/17854061

Can Behavior Be Controlled by Genes? The Case of Honeybee Work Assignments

ScienceDaily (Apr. 18, 2012) — What worker bees do depends on how old they are. A worker a few days old will become a nurse bee that devotes herself to feeding larvae (brood), secreting beeswax to seal the cells that contain brood and attending to the queen.

After about a week, she will progress to other tasks, such as grooming nest mates, ventilating the nest and packing pollen. Only at the end of her life will she become a forager, venturing forth to collect nectar and pollen for the colony.

Yehuda Ben-Shahar, PhD, assistant professor of biology in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, wondered if this highly stereotyped system of task allocation wasn't somehow under genetic control.

In an article published in the advance online edition of Genes, Brain and Behavior April 6, he and colleagues from Washington University, the University of Delaware, the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and the Institute for System Biology in Seattle, demonstrate that the division of labor among honeybees coincides with the presence in their brains of tiny snippets of noncoding RNA, called micro-RNAs, or miRNAs, that suppress the expression of genes.


Continued:  http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/04/120418095533.htm