Genes decide honeybees role in the hive

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Genes decide honeybees role in the hive

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A honeybee's role in the hive is determined by certain chemicals in their genes.

17 September,2012 09:03 pm

While some honeybees are marked out from birth as queens and exist solely to reproduce, the majority take on one of two roles – feeding and grooming the queen, or foraging for resources like nectar and pollen.But mystery has surrounded how the work is divided up because despite the fact these two jobs require very different types of behaviour, the entire workforce of sisters who perform them are genetic clones of one another.Now researchers claim the distinction that marks some worker bees out as nurses and others as foragers lies not in their genetic code, but in chemicals which attach themselves to their genes and influence the way they act.The so-called epigenetic patterns can switch certain genes on or off, or change the way they function in the brain and cause identical bees to act in different ways, researchers claimed.Their study, published in the Nature Neuroscience journal, is believed to be the first to demonstrate that these reversible changes can alter the way a creature behaves.The scientists, from Johns Hopkins University and Arizona State University in the USA, analysed the DNA of worker bees and found that foragers had one kind of chemical tag latched onto their genes, while their sisters who remained in the hive and tended to the queen had a completely different pattern.When the researchers removed the nurse bees from the hive, forcing some of the foragers to change roles, the chemical profiles of those which swapped jobs changed to fit their new position.Dr Andrew Feinberg, one of the studys senior authors, told the Guardian it was likely that similar epigenetic changes in humans could influence our behaviour.He said: If this is true in a bee it has to be partly true in us. Nature is pretty good at finding the simplest way to accomplish things with the least amount of energy.