Genetic instructions that determine the potential of sophisticated behaviors in the developing brain of worker honeybees (Apis mellifera)

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Honeybees (Apis mellifera) live in complex and structured social societies. We still have a limited understanding of the genetic controls and evolutionary routes that have resulted in the complex social worker behaviors that have evolved in these insects over the last 60 million years. Our previous results have shown that the feminizer (fem) gene, the key regulator of the honeybee sex-determining pathway, is also essential to the specification of brain differentiation and behaviors in worker bees. In the proposed project, we will identify the targets of the fem gene using the RNA-seq method, bioinformatic filtering and expression analyses. We will conduct knockdowns of promising candidate genes using RNAi and will study worker bee behavior both in single bee assays and in the social context of the colony. Our study seeks to understand how the social behaviors of honeybees are specified in the brain and how this regulation evolved.