“Something environmentally related is causing expression-level changes in the CHC profiles of the bees,” Vernier said. Which specific components of the honey bee CHC profile represent the nestmate recognition cue remains unknown. They don’t react to it.”Īs an important caveat, the new study does not directly address the mechanism by which cue specificity is determined in bees. Most colony members don’t produce the signal that tells anyone if they belong or not, and they don’t care about the signal. It involves an interaction between very specific bees within the colony,” Ben-Shahar said. “Nestmate recognition is something that is very context-specific. But it’s a different story after 3 weeks of age - when guards bite, sting and/or drag outsiders away from the door. Place a 1-day-old, 1-week-old, or 2-week-old outsider on the stoop in front of a guard, and she is likely to be able to waltz on through. Still, it is hard to know who they are until they react to somebody.” Their forelegs are usually raised, and they’re very alert. “They sit in the entrance and they have a very specific posture,” Ben-Shahar said of the guards. Guard bees are the only ones who care to identify outsiders. Importantly, not every bee notices the difference in scent profiles. Guards are gatekeepers specific triggers still unknown “What we found is that it’s actually a combination of both - of being at the age for foraging, and actually performing the foraging activities,” said Ben-Shahar. These two groups were also significantly different. So Vernier also compared the CHC profiles of foraging-age bees that were held in the hive and not permitted to forage with bees that were able to venture out. They also are exposed to different environmental factors such as sunshine and rain that could affect their body coatings. Bees that exit the hive to collect nectar encounter lots of scents on flowers and other surfaces they touch. The researchers wanted to separate out whether the differences they saw were based on age alone, or were somehow tied to the older bees’ foraging activities. (Courtesy photo)Ī 3-week-old foraging bee also has a very different job to support the hive than a younger bee - one who spends her time as a nurse caring for bee larvae and building the waxy honeycomb structures in the hive. She is shown here at Tyson Research Center, Washington University’s environmental field station. Graduate student Cassondra Vernier conducted lab experiments and observed hours of bee interactions at the entrance to the hive. The 3-week-old bees had significantly different profiles than their younger siblings. Vernier compared the CHC profiles of bees on the day they were born and at 1 week, 2 weeks, and 3 weeks old. When in fact that is not what we saw,” she said. “You would expect, then, that even younger bees would have a very similar pheromonal profile as older bees. Vernier, a graduate student at Washington University and first author of the new study. “It was always assumed that the way that honey bees acquire nestmate recognition cues, their cuticular hydrocarbon (CHC) profiles, is through these mechanisms where they rub up against each other, or transfer compounds between each other,” said Cassondra L. The work was completed in collaboration with researchers from the lab of Joel Levine at the University of Toronto. But new work from the laboratory of Yehuda Ben-Shahar, associate professor of biology in Arts & Sciences, shows that nestmate recognition instead depends on an innate developmental process that is associated with age-dependent division of labor. That’s how it works for some ants and other insects, at least. Until this point, most bee researchers thought bees recognize and respond to a scent that is the homogenized scent of all of the members of their own colony. This work offers new insight into one of the most important interactions in the lives of social insects: recognizing self and other. A study in the journal eLife reports that honey bees ( Apis mellifera) develop different scent profiles as they age, and the gatekeeper bees at the hive’s door respond differently to returning foragers than they do when they encounter younger bees who have never ventured out before. It’s also the moment at which she becomes recognizable to other bees, according to new research from Washington University in St. For her, this is a moment of great risk, and great reward. Only after she turns 21 days old does she leave the nest to look for pollen and nectar. Surrounded by 40,000 of her closest relatives, this dark and constantly buzzing place is all that she knows. It is a classic coming-of-age story, in many ways.Ī honey bee hatches and grows up deep inside a hive.
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