Buff-tailed bumblebeeWIKIPEDIA, ALVESGASPARIn the colonies of many ants, bees, and wasps, queens are the only females that reproduce. They enforce their privileged status through chemical control, emitting pheromones that make countless workers infertile. But ironically, these pheromones may have evolved from substances that showcased reproductive potential, rather than suppressing it.
Until now, scientists had only identified sterilizing queen pheromones in the domestic honeybee, black garden ants (Lasius), and a species of termite. Now, Annette Van Oystaeyen and Ricardo Caliari Oliveira from the University of Leuven, along with Luke Holman from the Australian National University, have identified similar pheromones in three more social insects: a desert ant (Cataglyphis iberica), the buff-tailed bumblebee (Bombus terrestris), and the common wasp (Vespula vulgaris).
These species have been separated by more than 145 million years of evolution, and they belong to lineages that independently evolved from solitary ancestors. But the team found that their queens all use the same class of compounds—long saturated hydrocarbons, or alkanes—as sterilizing pheromones. This suggests that queen pheromones repeatedly evolved from chemicals found in the ...
