Inspired by a question from a toddler, researchers have discovered a new type of worker honeybee that helps to raise royalty. The find is reported in Nature.
Honeybees live in complex societies that include a single reproductive queen, hundreds of male drones and thousands of female worker bees. Workers earn their name. They guard, forage, feed and maintain the hive and its famously hexagonal cells.
A few years ago, bee expert Kai Wang from the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, Beijing, brought his young son to the lab to look at the observation hive. Pointing to a queen cell (where queen larvae develop), which looks like a hanging peanut, the then two-year-old Dongyue asked his father, “Daddy, is this also a bee’s house? Why isn’t it a hexagon?”
“That innocent question hit me like a lightning bolt,” says Wang. To find the answer, Wang and his team started to observe the hive more closely. They noticed workers using their mandibles to chew and manipulate the wax on the queen cells. Reasoning the workers must have softened the wax with heat, they filmed the insects with infrared thermal cameras. “We discovered that worker bees heat their thoraxes while building queen cells,” says Wang. “Essentially, they turn their bodies into tiny, living furnaces.”
A new class of worker bee was discovered. The insects even had different patterns of gene expression their abdomen. Wang calls them “royal engineers” because their job is to create the odd-looking queen cells. But there was more to come.
For years, it was presumed that queens become queens because they consume royal jelly, the glandular substance secreted by workers and fed to them as larvae. Queen cells may look weird, but the structure and composition of the cell was thought irrelevant.
Using scanning electron microscopy, Wang and his team found that queen cell wax has unique properties: it is less dense, more pliable and has a higher melting point than worker cell wax.
This is significant. In an experiment, 172 queen larvae were allowed to develop for a week in lab-created cells made from either queen or worker wax. Queens in cells made from worker wax were smaller and more likely to die. This suggests that queen cells are not just structural containers but engineered microenvironments that play a critical role in queen development.
“We often think we already know so much about honey bees, but the level of strategy, organisation and sheer complexity involved in their architectural behaviour goes far beyond our current understanding,” says Wang. “They are true masterminds.”
- How is a queen bee chosen? And how are they different from worker bees?
- Why does a bee die after it stings you?
Top image: Queen bee cells. Credit: Fang Yu
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