About one-fifth of all Melipona beecheii stingless bee larvae develop as queens, but the colony only accepts one – the rest are executed by worker guards.
. Caliari Oliveira and his colleagues wondered if they chose so many queens in order to spread the colony’s DNA into other hives through parasitism.M. beecheiiIn the lab, they also gave higher doses of geraniol or saline to more than 600 larvae. To their surprise, they discovered that extra geraniol didn’t affect the development of the larvae, meaning workers weren’t controlling queen production after all.
Genetic sequencing revealed that the DNA of each hive remained 100 per cent consistent, showing no evidence of parasitism – even though two other species ofcolonies, virgin queens run around the hive in desperate and usually unsuccessful efforts to evade the worker guards, he says. Survivors might try to enter a different hive, only to be killed by that colony’s guards.The study “settles a bit of a controversy” aboutat the University of Bristol, UK.
But it doesn’t offer a new explanation for how the larvae “decide” to become queens. “For me, this is still one of the biggest puzzles in biology,” he says. “Is it a gene? A particular combination of genes? An interaction between certain nutritional factors and genetic elements? We just don’t know.” While scientists talk about the larvae choosing to become a queen or being selfish, they emphasise that these are unlikely to be conscious desires of the individual larvae. Rather, they are biologically driven preferences. “There is genetic selfishness, but that doesn’t mean that the individuals have any kind of thoughts about it,” says Grueter.
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