Anyone who reads the blog knows that I’m a mosquito magnet. As I’ve written, one minute near the woods and I get bitten. A few days ago, in broad daylight, I was showing a carpenter something next to our house and in about 30 seconds I had a first: A mosquito bite on the palm of my hand.
Unfortunately, mosquitos aren’t the only insects that have taken a liking to me. When I was about 7, I turned over a detached slide in a neighbor’s backyard and a nest of hornets chased me home. And then there was the time I was picking my daughters up at a babysitter’s and several bees flew into my open car window and stung me on the ear lobe. I was minding my own business. These experiences coupled with several occasions when yellow jackets have stung me as I sat quietly in the grass or simply walked through the woods make me wonder if Mother Nature has it in for me.
Nevertheless, I do like honey and have never been attacked by a honey bee, so I have nothing against that variety. Actually, I rather like them and what they do to pollinate the flowers. So I read with interest a new study in this week’s ACS PressPac sharing information about the honeybee’s fascinating caste system.
Scientists are reporting deep new insights into whys and how’s of the famous caste system that dominates honey bee societies, with a select few bee larvae destined for royalty and the masses for worker status. Their study probing the innermost biological makings of queen bees and worker bees appears in ACS’s Journal of Proteome Research.
Jianke Li and colleagues (The joint work of scientists from China and Ethiopia) note that despite more than a century of research, mysteries remain about the biochemical factors at the basis of the fascinating caste system in honeybee colonies. Schoolchildren learn that the (usually) one queen bee in a colony develops from larvae fed royal jelly, a protein-rich secretion from glands on the heads of worker bees. Other larvae develop into female workers or male drones. Although queen and worker bees share almost identical genes, their destinies could be more different.
“The female queen is large in size and specializes in reproduction,” the scientists explain, “whereas workers are small and engage in colony-maintaining activities. Their life spans also vary, with the queen living for 1 to 2 years and the workers living only 6 to 7 weeks. To gain further information, the scientists looked at proteins inside the cells of larvae destined for queen and worker status.
Their findings reveal major differences, during early stages of life, in the activity of proteins in the mitochondria, structures that produce energy for cells. The differences include changes in the amounts of protein produced in cells and the activity of those proteins. In pre-queen larvae, proteins involved in carbohydrate and energy metabolism, for instance, are much more active than in workers. “This suggests proteins with metabolic enhancing activities generally appear to have significant roles in the process of caste determination,” the researchers conclude.
To read more, go to
http://bit.ly/qmAAKD
Image: iStock
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