SCIENCE NEWS - A queen bee may be shaped by more than its famous royal diet.
The wax of the peanut-shaped chamber where the queen develops has distinct physical and chemical properties that help steer its development, researchers report June 3 in Nature. By analyzing the chamber’s composition and the larvae it harbors, the team challenges the long-held notion that royal jelly alone — the queen-making food fed to select larvae — makes a queen.
“The discovery is very cool and thought-provoking,” says Thomas Seeley, a biologist at Cornell University who was not involved in the work. “To me, queen cells have long seemed important because odors from a developing queen may permeate the wax walls, marking them as very special spots that workers recognize and don’t accidentally damage.”
But for entomologist Boris Baer, the cells posed a question born of years observing his own colonies. “Bees spend so much time and energy constructing these cells that it made little evolutionary sense if they were merely larger food containers,” says Baer, of the University of California, Riverside. “Could the cell itself contribute to queen development?”