Bee larvae fed beebread never become queens

Abstract

A simple meal is all that is needed to determine the fate of a honeybee larva. It turns out that fragments of genetic material from flowers in their food control the bees' destinies. When female larvae are fed royal jelly, secreted by other bees, they develop into large, fertile queens. But most larvae eat beebread, a mix of pollen and nectar. These larvae develop into small, sterile workers. Xi Chen at Nanjing University in China and colleagues have now found that beebread contains lots of small RNA molecules called microRNAs that regulate the expression of genes.