The Divisive Diet of Honeybees: Why Some Will Never Be Royals
That stings! A new study suggests that fragments of plant genetic material in the pollen-rich diets of worker bee larvae ensures that they never grow up to be queens.
When a female honeybee hatches, her future holds one of two possible paths within the hive's caste system. She will become either a worker bee or a queen bee. And her fate is determined in part by the food she eats as a larva.
Larvae that are fed mostly a bitter type of pollen combined with honey, a mixture called "beebread," grow up to be worker bees. They are generally sterile. Future queens, on the other hand, grow up on royal jelly-- a goopy, yellowish substance that is secreted from the glands of worker bees. The queen's sole task in life is to make more bees. She also lives a longer life and has a stinger she can use more than once without dying.
