Despite having identical genetic instructions, female honey bee larvae can develop into either long-lived reproductive queens or short-lived sterile workers who help rear their sisters rather than laying their own eggs.
Despite having identical genetic instructions, female honey bee larvae can develop into either long-lived reproductive queens or short-lived sterile workers who help rear their sisters rather than laying their own eggs. Now, an interdisciplinary team led by researchers at Penn State has uncovered the molecular mechanisms that control how the conflict between genes inherited from the father and the mother determine the larva’s fate.
They published their findings this week (June 18) in Genome Biology.
“Imagine if your mother's genes and your father's genes were in constant disagreement about how you should develop — that is essentially what genomic imprinting is, and we see that it happens across the tree of life: from honey bees to humans,” said Sean Bresnahan, the lead author of the study who conducted the study as a doctoral candidate in the Interdisciplinary Graduate Degree Program in Molecular, Cellular, and Integrative Biosciences in the Huck Institutes of the Life Sciences at Penn State. Supported by a U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate Research Fellowship at the time, Bresnahan graduated in 2024 and is now a data scientist at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center. “We found that this genetic ‘argument’ can be detected during a critical developmental window where a honey bee larva becomes either a queen or a worker.”
Read More: Penn State
Queen bees emit a pheromone that attracts worker bees — the queen's daughters — to her side. (Photo Credit: Sean Bresnahan)
