Subject: Laying workers - new research

From: [email-masked] (Owen Watson)
Date: Fri, 28 Oct 1994 09:33:36 +1200

London, Oct 27 AAP - Old notions about the birds and the bees are being
challenged as revolution is threatened by discontented beehive workers.
At least that's according to Australian scientific research, which has
found evidence of anarchy in the beehive and moves to usurp the queen bee.
A team from the School of Genetics and Human Variation at Victoria's La
Trobe University said in this week's Nature journal that worker bees had
found a way to cheat the system which normally favoured eggs laid by the
queen.
The researchers, Benjamin Oldroyd, Adam Smolenski, Jean-Marie Cornuet and
Ross Crozier, said worker bees often have functional ovaries able to
produce fertile male eggs. 
However, reproduction by worker bees was extremely rare in many species,
and that probably was suppressed by a mutual policing behaviour where
workers prevented others from laying eggs. 
In honeybees, eggs laid by the queen are protected and can be identified
by smell, while worker-laid eggs, which do not contain the distinctive
pheromone, are destroyed by other workers. 
However, the research team said its DNA tracing of a bee colony at
Ipswich, Queensland, had found workers who got around the system. 
One of the males mating with the queen had passed on an ability to his
worker offspring to evade the policing mechanism. His progeny were able to
develop ovaries and produce a queen-like pheromone which protected their
eggs.
Such bees probably were more ``queen-like'' than normal bees, and there
was a chance those ``false queens'' could be installed in queenless
colonies, the team said.
``This anarchistic behaviour could rapidly spread in honeybee
populations,'' the researchers wrote, adding the fitness of those bees is
higher than that of workers who can not evade policing. 
They said their results demonstrated ``a previously unrecognised dynamic
equilibrium between reproductive conflict and cooperation''. 
What that means for the future of the queen bee, and the current orderly
but competitive system of the hive, is unknown.