What Determines Royalty Among Honeybees? Not Just a Distinct Diet—Queens Also Need Specially Built Regal Chambers, a Study Suggests
The peanut-shaped compartments where future queens grow up seem to play an important role in development. The wax has chemical and physical differences from that in other parts of the hive
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It takes a village to raise a child, but it takes a highly specialized beehive chamber to raise a honeybee queen, according to new research.
In a study published on June 3 in the journal Nature, researchers describe how a queen’s royal compartment seems to have unique properties that might help a monarch emerge. Additionally, they identify a distinct group of worker bees responsible for building the special nurseries. The findings reveal a previously unknown “job” held by the insects as well as new factors that contribute to royalty.
Honeybees each hold a different position within their complex societies. A queen is typically the only reproductive female in a colony, and male drones mate with her. Female worker bees stay busy buzzing around collecting nectar and pollen, maintaining the beehive and caring for the queen and her offspring.
Previously, researchers thought that queens rose to power primarily because they gorged themselves with royal jelly, a substance secreted by worker bees. Young monarchs also grow up in waxy beehive compartments, called cells, shaped differently from the typical hexagonal ones. A royal chamber looks like a peanut protruding from the hive. But until recently, scientists paid little attention to the shelters’ possible role in shaping a queen.
“For centuries, we believed ‘you are what you eat’ was the only rule for making a queen bee. Our study rewrites that rule to say, ‘you are where you live, too,’” study co-author Kai Wang, a bee researcher at the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, tells the Associated Press’ Adithi Ramakrishnan.
The study was partially inspired by a question posed a few years ago by Wang’s son, who was then 2 years old. When the scientist showed him a hive in the lab, the boy pointed to a queen cell and asked why it looked so different from the other cells, Wang tells BBC Discover Wildlife’s Helen Pilcher.
“That innocent question hit me like a lightning bolt,” he says.
Quick fact: How many honeybee species?
Experts currently recognize at least nine honeybee species worldwide. This study involved two of them, Apis cerana and Apis mellifera.
Wang and his colleagues then proceeded to study this very special bee house. Microscope images revealed that queen cell wax is more pliable and less dense than worker cell wax, and further tests indicated it has a higher melting point and chemical distinctions.
The researchers also raised dozens of baby queens for seven days in cups capped with either worker wax or queen wax. Bees that grew up surrounded by worker wax were smaller and had higher death rates compared to those in royal wax, the team found. The results indicate that the queen cells’ distinct biochemical environment plays a vital part in the youngsters’ development.
The bees that build the queen cells are also special, according to the researchers. They are usually younger than worker cell builders, and they have higher body temperatures and different gene activity. The royal construction workers seem to modify recycled wax by adding newly secreted substances, such as fatty compounds called lipids, the team found.
“The discovery is very cool and thought-provoking,” says Thomas Seeley, a biologist at Cornell University who didn’t participate in the research, to Science News’ Anirban Mukhopadhyay. “To me, queen cells have long seemed important because odors from a developing queen may permeate the wax walls, marking them as very special spots that workers recognize and don’t accidentally damage.”
Ecologist James Nieh finds the discovery of the wax’s role “quite interesting,” reports Chemical & Engineering News’ Soumya Sagar. He’s curious about whether something similar takes place in other bees, such as members of the Melipona genus, in which “the workers themselves decide whether or not to become a queen.” The answer might lie in the queen cells’ chemical traits, notes Nieh, of the University of California, San Diego, who wasn’t involved in the study.
Many mysteries remain, and the team is particularly intrigued by the unique chemical scents they identified in the royal cells. “Are they influencing the developing queen’s senses, preparing her for mating and life after emergence?” Wang wonders, per Science News. “Are some produced by the larva herself? And could the future queen be actively communicating with the workers constructing her chamber?”
In the future, the researchers aim to figure out exactly when the royal wax begins to shape a growing queen’s development.
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