Caste Determination and Early Differentiation in the Honey Bee

在蜜蜂中，雌性幼虫可以发育成蜂王或工蜂。数百年来，生物学家和养蜂人一直想知道这是如何发生的。个体选择成为一种或另一种类型的女性的直接原因是营养。众所周知，荷尔蒙会触发发育开关，使其转向女王或工蚁的发育。这项研究的目的是了解营养差异如何转化为荷尔蒙信号，从而导致具有基本相同基因的个体发育非常不同。现代分子方法将与经典的实验操作相结合，以确定幼蜂幼虫如何对不同类型的营养做出反应，以及由此产生的激素信号如何增加这些差异。这些结果不仅有助于理解蜜蜂，也有助于理解其他使用类似开关的昆虫，如蚂蚁、白蚁、蚜虫和蚱蜢。

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.