Caste Determination and Early Differentiation in the Honey Bee

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In honey bees, female larvae can develop into either queens or workers. For hundreds of years, biologists and beekeepers have wondered how this happens. The immediate cause of individuals choosing to become one or the other type of female is nutrition. It is also known that hormones trigger the developmental switch to flip towards queen or worker development. The objective of this research is to understand how nutritional differences are translated into hormonal signals that cause individuals with essentially the same genes to develop very differently. Modern molecular methods will be combined with classical experimental manipulation to determine how young bee larvae respond to different types of nutrition and how these differences are increased by resulting hormonal signals. The results will be useful in understanding not only honey bees, but also other insects that use similar sorts of switches, such as ants, termites, aphids, and grasshoppers.