SELFISH BEES MASQUERADE OWN EGGS AS ROYALTY
12.10.07 - Leído 63 veces. Enviar esta notaDani Cooper
New research finds some worker bees are out for themselves
WASHINGTON, U.S.; December 10, 2007.- The revolutionary-style activity of a type of honey bee has dealt a blow to the image of insects working co-operatively to benefit the colony.
In the ultimate overthrow of the monarchy, worker bees sneak their eggs into the colony so their offspring will be raised as royalty, according to new research by Lyndon Jordan of the University of Sydney, Australia.
To avoid detection, the workers wear a “queen perfume,” says Jordan, a Ph.D. student from the School of Biological Sciences.
In an article in this week’s Proceedings of the Royal Society B journal, Jordan describes her genetic analysis of South African Cape honey bees (Apis mellifera capensis).
Her study revealed 23 out of 39 new queens produced by seven colonies were offspring of workers and not the resident queen. Of these, eight were laid by resident workers, but most were offspring of parasitic workers from other colonies.
She points out the Cape honey bee is unique among honey bees because workers can produce females from unfertilized eggs in a process known as thelytoky.
This opens up a whole range of reproductive options for the Cape worker bee and allows it to effectively hijack the colony by competing with the queen to produce the next royal generation.
“Normally a worker is a terminating genetic line,” Jordan said. “But these bees can be the mothers of the new queens.”
Offspring produced by thelytoky are “pseudo-clones of their mothers”. So, Jordan said, the parasitic worker bees “have the potential to become genetically reincarnated as queens” and therefore “genetically immortal.”
Normally, if a worker bee sees an unrelated individual in the colony laying an egg, it would kill that intruder. But the Cape honey bee gets around that by wearing a “queen perfume” to infiltrate the host colony.
With its subterfuge a success, the worker bee then lays its eggs in specially prepared “queen cells” where the egg is raised by the colony as if it were from its own queen.
Whether bee larvae develop into queens depends on the quality and amount of food they receive. Eggs laid in the queen cells are given highly nutritious royal jelly and are fed more often.
The successful reproduction of a parasitic queen bee has the potential to terminate the colony’s genetic line and replace it with its own.
“We always knew these Cape workers could produce females but we never knew how far they were willing to push that,” Jordan said.
She added there’s an image of a team effort with everyone working together for a common good, but “it is barely restrained chaos with everyone being as selfish as they can while still keeping the colony viable.”
And, she points out, an unrelated intruder does not care about the long-term viability of the colony.
(ABC Science Online)
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