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When it comes to social insects, we may first think of bees. A swarm of bees usually live together in a community, and there is a community in a hive. In a hive, there is only one queen bee, whose only job is to mate with drones and reproduce. Worker bees, who are also female bees, are responsible for foraging, taking care of beehives, driving away invaders and taking care of larvae. So the question is, since worker bees are also females, why don't they breed? The latest findings of scientists seem to subvert our inherent perceptions in the past.

(by Mei Lin / tr. by Robert Taylor)

As we all know, in a colony, worker bees usually do not participate in reproduction, and only the queen bee has the right to reproduce. But is this really the case?

Do worker bees really not breed? Bees are a kind of abnormal developing insects. Before they are feathered, it has been determined which pupae will emerge as queen bees and which are worker bees. Jacobus J. Boomsma, a professor at the Center for Social Evolution at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark, believes that the differentiation between worker bees and queen bees is irreversible. In other words, according to Bumsma, worker bees will always be workers and will not become queen bees.

However, scientists later discovered that in some cases, worker bees can also help the queen to breed. In other words, worker bees sometimes breed, but they lay unfertilized eggs and only drones. Therefore, since all the eggs laid by worker bees are unfertilized, they do not need reproductive organs such as seminal vesicles. This phenomenon is common in bees and social ants, where the fertilization vesicles of worker bees and ants have degenerated. In other words, although worker bees also lay eggs and reproduce, they do not mate with drones.

For quite a long time, scientists have believed that this is an adaptive feature of "diligent and frugal housekeeping". In the process of growth and development, worker bees save the energy and nutrients to maintain the development and activities of these reproductive organs, so that they can concentrate on their work and will not compete with the queen bee for reproduction, which is most beneficial to the continuation of the population.

However, some new studies have found some phenomena that are difficult to explain, and it seems that scientists have come to the wrong conclusion in the past.

In 2000, scientists compared the reproductive organs of drone worker bees and queen bees. They found that the fertilization vesicles of male worker bees are more or less the same as those of queen bees, and their physiological structure and secretions are also similar to those of queen bees, except that the size of seminal vesicles is slightly different. Later, scientists found a similar phenomenon in wasps and some ants.

Seeing this, maybe my buddies don't understand it. In traditional cognition, worker bees degenerate their reproductive organs such as fertilized sacs in order to save energy and nutrients. However, the study found that the fertilization vesicles of male worker bees are similar to those of queen bees. Why do non-mating and thrifty worker bees have fertilization vesicles similar to those of queen bees? Is there something wrong with the traditional view of the scientific community, or is the finding unreliable?

Worker bees also have the right to mate, which has long been difficult for scientists to explain. To this end, Li Jilian, a researcher at the Bee Research Institute of the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, artificially inseminated bumblebee workers to find out what the drones' fertilization vesicles do.

After one failure after another, recently, Li Jilian's research has finally made a breakthrough. Scientists from Li Jilian's team speculated that the social environment may have inhibited the mating behavior of worker bees. In other words, if you live in a drones colony, worker bees will not mate, and artificial insemination by scientists will not be successful.

To this end, scientists isolated male worker bees. Sure enough, they successfully observed the scene of drones mating with drones, and the workers laid fertilized eggs. Li Jilian believes that this phenomenon subverts the inherent perception of bees-in the past, scientists thought that the differentiation between worker bees and queen bees was decided before Eclosion and was irreversible.

Later, Li Jilian's team observed that when the colony lacks a queen, worker bees will also replace the queen and mate with drones. This is an adaptation to the absence of the queen bee, which is extremely beneficial to the continuation of the population. The study by Li Jilian's team was published in the September 7, 2023 issue of Nature Communication.

References:

Unexpected worker mating and colony-founding in a superorganism | Nature Communications

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