WIKIMEDIA, QUARTLA newly hatched female honeybee larva can develop into either an egg-laying queen or a sterile worker. One determinant of a female bee’s social caste, it turns out, is the insect’s early-life diet. Future queens are fed nothing but royal jelly, a glandular secretion of so-called nurse bees, which feed both the larvae and the queen; queens continue this exclusive royal jelly diet throughout their lives. Future worker bees, on the other hand, are only fed royal jelly for their first three days; after that, they eat royal jelly mixed with fermented pollen, called beebread, and honey. Precisely what about these honeybee baby foods might help determine their developmental fates has long been an open question.
Consumption of the phytochemical p-coumaric acid, a phenolic substance found in beebread and honey but not in royal jelly, may be one factor that leads female larvae to become worker bees, according to a study published today (August 28) in Science Advances. Researchers from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign “show that p-coumaric acid is a potent regulator of gene regulation and development in honey bees,” Ryszard Maleszka, who studies genetics and epigenetics in honeybees at the Australian National University in Canberra but was not involved in the work wrote in email to The Scientist. This chemical, he continued, “has the capacity to suppress ovary development and it affects the expression of genes including those controlling organ sizes, epigenetic machineries and detoxification.”
“The authors clearly ...
