Abstract
ABSTRACTThe effect of larval nutrition on female fertility in honey bees is a focus for both scientific studies and for practical applications in beekeeping. In general, morphological traits are standards for classifying queens and workers and for evaluating their quality. In recent years, in vitro rearing techniques have been improved and used in many studies; they can produce queen-like and worker-like bees. Here, we questioned whether queens and workers reared in vitro are the same as queens and workers reared in a natural hive environment. We reared workers and queens both in vitro and naturally in beehives to test how these different environments affect metabolic physiology and candidate genes in newly emerged queens and workers. We found that sugar (glucose and trehalose) levels differed between queens and workers in both in vitro and in-hive-reared bees. The in vitro-reared bees had significantly higher levels of lipids in the abdomen. Moreover, hive reared queens had almost 20 times higher levels of vitellogenin than in vitro-reared queens, despite similar morphologies. In addition, hive-reared bees had significantly higher levels of expression of mrjp1. In conclusion, in vitro rearing produces queens and workers that differ from those reared in the hive environment at physiological and gene expression levels.This article has an associated First Person interview with the first author of the paper.
Highlights
Female honey bee queens and workers differ greatly in many phenotypic aspects, which are in turn related to their social roles
Principal component analysis (PCA) revealed that 31.50% of the total variation of morphological structures can be explained by the first principal component (PC1), and 16.17% of the remaining variation can be explained by the second principal component (PC2)
Samples of in vitro raised bees that emerged with intermediate morphology, currently known as intercastes (De Sousa et al, 2015), were discarded from our sampling and the analyses described below were performed only with the bees that emerged with clearly adult queen-like or worker-like phenotypes
Summary
Female honey bee queens and workers differ greatly in many phenotypic aspects, which are in turn related to their social roles. Queens are larger (150–250 mg), with a huge abdomen that has well-developed reproductive apparatuses: ovaries with 200–400 ovarian filaments (ovarioles) and a spermatheca (Snodgrass, 1956), which makes her able to perform one of her most important social tasks, laying eggs. Workers are smaller (80–110 mg) and have Workers usually do not produce eggs when the queen is present in the colony (Ruttner, 1983; Graham, 1992)
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a callDisclaimer: All third-party content on this website/platform is and will remain the property of their respective owners and is provided on "as is" basis without any warranties, express or implied. Use of third-party content does not indicate any affiliation, sponsorship with or endorsement by them. Any references to third-party content is to identify the corresponding services and shall be considered fair use under The CopyrightLaw.
