Larger eggs contain more nutrients so the resulting embryos may have a better chance of survival. Previous studies indicate that the number and size of the eggs vary according to the conditions inside the colony and in the surrounding environment. She has two massive ovaries and can produce up to two thousand eggs per day. They perform most of the activities essential for the survival of the colony, including foraging for pollen and nectar and taking care of eggs and larvae.Īn individual known as the queen bee is the mother of the colony and is normally the only female who reproduces. The vast majority of bees are sterile females known as worker bees. Honey bees are social insects that live in large colonies containing tens of thousands of individuals.
It remains to be studied how widespread this mechanism is and whether it has consequences for population dynamics and epigenetic influences on offspring phenotype in honey bees and other species.
These results elucidate how the social environment of the honey bee colony may be translated into a specific cellular process to adjust maternal investment into eggs. Spatio-temporal expression analysis via RNAscope and qPCR supports an important role of Rho1 in egg-size determination, and subsequent RNAi-mediated gene knockdown confirmed that Rho1 has a major effect on egg size in honey bees. Based on functional and network analyses, we further study the small GTPase Rho1 as a candidate regulator of egg size. Egg-size plasticity is associated with quantitative changes of 290 ovarian proteins, most of which relate to energy metabolism, protein transport, and cytoskeleton. Additional results suggest that these effects cannot be solely explained by egg-laying rate and are due to the queens’ perception of colony size. Here, we show in a series of experiments that queens predictably and reversibly increase egg size in small colonies and decrease egg size in large colonies, while their ovary size changes in the opposite direction. However, the proximate causes of these adjustments are insufficiently understood, especially in oviparous species with complex social organization in which adaptive evolution is shaped by kin selection. Although variation in reproductive effort often affects the number of offspring, adjustments of propagule size are also found in numerous species, including the Western honey bee, Apis mellifera. Reproduction involves the investment of resources into offspring.
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