Honey bee genes give clues to social behaviour
Honey bees are fascinating insects - they work together for the good of the hive, even at the expense of the individual. They communicate by dance, giving the direction and distance of a food source to the other bees. Queens are made by feeding the larvae protein rich “royal jelly”, which somehow triggers different genes. And they’re able to do all of this despite having only a million neurons in their brains (humans have about 100 billion!).
All of this makes them fascinating insects to study, and things just got better - researchers have succesfully sequenced the honey bee DNA, as published (subscription required) in the prestigious journal Nature today. This means we, in principle, know everything that makes up the bee - and if we can understand how all those genes fit together to produce the complex hive behaviour we might be better able to understand our own brains, too.
So far, they’ve already found some fascinating things, some of the bee genes are closer to verterbrates than insects, particularly circadian rhythms (our internal “biological clock”), the honeybee genmoe evolved much more slowly than the fruitfly, and there are many “molecular switches” called miRNAs which can turn other genes on or off, and it seems that these are responsible for the bee choosing different jobs. So that means genetics plays a key role in the bees behaviour. The next step is to really explore how all these basic rules provided by the genetics fit together to create the incredibly complicated behaviour seen for the whole bee society. How is the bee’s “waggle dance” encoded in its genes? And how did these behaviours actually evolve?
Most interestingly, they want to explore whether there’s similarities between a bee and human behaviour. For instance, some bees go off to hunt for food, while others wait to be told where the food is before going off to get it. Do the scout bees have the same genes that make humans do crazy stuff like bungee jumping? And by exploring the way bees respond and change after being red royal jelly we might learn more about obesity in humans.