The cuticular hydrocarbon profiles of honey bee workers develop via a socially-modulated innate process
- Washington University in St Louis, United States
- University of Toronto Mississauga, Canada
- Tel Aviv University, Israel
Abstract
Large social insect colonies exhibit a remarkable ability for recognizing group members via colony-specific cuticular pheromonal signatures. Previous work suggested that in some ant species, colony-specific pheromonal profiles are generated through a mechanism involving the transfer and homogenization of cuticular hydrocarbons (CHCs) across members of the colony. However, how colony-specific chemical profiles are generated in other social insect clades remains mostly unknown. Here we show that in the honey bee (Apis mellifera), the colony-specific CHC profile completes its maturation in foragers via a sequence of stereotypic age-dependent quantitative and qualitative chemical transitions, which are driven by environmentally-sensitive intrinsic biosynthetic pathways. Therefore, the CHC profiles of individual honey bees are not likely produced through homogenization and transfer mechanisms, but instead mature in association with age-dependent division of labor. Furthermore, non-nestmate rejection behaviors seem to be contextually restricted to behavioral interactions between entering foragers and guards at the hive entrance.
Data availability
All data generated or analysed during this study are included in the manuscript and supporting files. All CHC chemical data are included in the data source files.
Article and author information
Author details
Funding
National Science Foundation (1545778)
- Yehuda Ben-Shahar
National Science Foundation (1707221)
- Yehuda Ben-Shahar
National Science Foundation (1754264)
- Yehuda Ben-Shahar
Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada
- Joel D Levine
Canadian Institutes of Health Research
- Joshua J Krupp
- Joel D Levine
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Reviewing Editor
- Kristin Scott, University of California, Berkeley, United States
Publication history
- Received: September 9, 2018
- Accepted: January 31, 2019
- Accepted Manuscript published: February 5, 2019 (version 1)
- Version of Record published: February 20, 2019 (version 2)
Copyright
© 2019, Vernier et al.
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
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The cuticular hydrocarbon profiles of honey bee workers develop via a socially-modulated innate process
eLife 8:e41855.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.41855
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