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Dryad

Diet quantity influences caste determination in honey bees (Apis mellifera)

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May 08, 2020 version files 358.23 KB

Abstract

In species that care for their young, provisioning has profound effects on offspring fitness. Provisioning is important in honey bees because nutritional cues determine whether a female becomes a reproductive queen or sterile worker. A qualitative difference between the larval diets of queens and workers is thought to drive this divergence; however, no single compound seems to be responsible. Diet quantity may have a role during honey bee caste determination yet has never been formally studied. Our goal was to determine the relative contributions of diet quantity and quality to queen development. Larvae were reared in vitro on nine diets varying in amount of royal jelly and sugars, which were fed to larvae in eight different quantities. Once adults eclosed, the queenliness was determined using Principal Component Analysis (PCA) on seven morphological measurements. We found that larvae fed the largest quantities of diet were indistinguishable from hive reared queens, independent of the proportion of protein and carbohydrate in the diet. Neither protein nor carbohydrate content had a significant influence on the first principle component (PC1), which explained 64.4% of the difference between queens and workers. Instead, the total quantity of diet explained a significant amount of the variation in PC1. Large amounts of diet in the final instar were capable of inducing queen traits, contrary to received wisdom that caste determination can only occur in the third instar. These results indicate that total diet quantity fed to larvae may regulate the difference between queen and worker castes in honey bees.