12 Monday Nov 2018
Posted in beekeeping, honey bee genetics
Most of us have heard of the importance of genes, how a mother and father each contribute their important element and so on. We accept, without question, that the mother contributes chromosomes from her egg and the father from his sperm. Much of the animal kingdom operates with these principles.
But that is not the case with honey bees.
Read the full article here: Honey Bee Genetics — PerfectBee
08 Friday Jun 2018
Posted in beekeeping, diseases
Tags
art, beekeeping pests, breeding better bees, diseases, honey bee diseases, honey bee genetics, opinion
Living in a honey bee hive is like living in a house with 40,000 siblings. It’s a pathogen’s dream. Left unchecked, contagious diseases can bring a colony to its knees, but honey bees – as well as other social insects – have evolved a way to fight back. Over millions of years, they have developed a collection of behaviors called ‘social immunity traits’ that help combat disease and parasite outbreaks.
Read the full article here: Breeding a better bee: Three social immunity traits, one massive experiment — Alison McAfee | Honey Bee Hub
04 Monday Jun 2018
Posted in beekeeping, diseases, famous beekeepers, honey bee genetics
More than a century ago, a young Benedictine monk at Buckfast Abbey in southern England starting helping out the older brothers in the abbey’s apiary. The monk, originally from Germany, was known as Brother Adam.
The bees kept at Buckfast at the time were either Italians or a native British strain, and soon after Brother Adam joined Team Bee, a massive die-off occurred. About 2/3 of the abbey’s hives were lost as the bees succumbed to a disease then known as acarine (today I believe it’s more commonly referred to as tracheal mite disease, which tells you all you need to know about it). All the native British bees died. Only the Italian bees made it.
Read the entire artice here: Bee Preview #2: Brother Adam’s Bees — The Honey Op
19 Thursday Oct 2017
Posted in beekeeping, biology, honey bee biology
Some social insects have proved to be adept invaders. Assisted by the international trade of the modern world, these species have spread far beyond the ocean and mountain barriers that once determined their distributions. In some cases, these range expansions have brought previously isolated sister species back into contact. What happens when such species try to mate?
We were interested in this question of interspecific mating in the case of two honey bees: the Western honey bee Apis mellifera and the Eastern honey (or hive) bee, Apis cerana. These species diverged from a common ancestor at least 6 million years ago, with A. mellifera native to Europe and Africa and A. cerana native to Asia and India. Western honey bees have of course since been transported, in association with agriculture, to every human-inhabited continent on earth. Eastern honey bees meanwhile, have been quietly expanding their range too in recent decades, invading both Papua New Guinea and Australia. Thus what were allopatric (or separate) ranges for millions of years have suddenly become partially sympatric.
Read entire article at: Sex between species: what happens when invasive honey bees meet the locals? — insectessociaux
12 Thursday Oct 2017
Posted in beekeeping, biology, honey bee biology
Honeybee larvae develop into workers but not queens, in part, because their diet of beebread/pollen is enriched in plant miRNAs. While miRNAs are generally negative regulators of gene expression in eukaryotes, they also negatively regulate larval development when honeybee larvae consume beebread/pollen and take up plant miRNAs. Xi Chen and Chen-Yu Zhang’s group in Nanjing University, report this finding on August 31, 2017 in PLOS Genetics.
How caste has formed in honeybees is an enduring puzzle. Although queens and workers are genetically identical, queens are reproductive and have a larger body size, develop faster and live longer than workers. Prevailing view is that differential larval feeding determines caste differentiation: royal jelly stimulates the differentiation of larvae into queen, whereas beebread and pollen consumed by the rest of the larvae lead to the worker bee fate. However, it is still not fully understood how alterations in diet modify so thoroughly the developmental trajectory of honeybees.
In previous studies, Chen-Yu Zhang’s group has reported a striking finding that plant miRNAs are ingested from plant diets and pass through the gastrointestinal tract, enter into the blood, accumulate in tissues and regulate endogenous gene expression in animals. Their findings suggest that ingested exogenous miRNAs can regulate endogenous gene expression and reshape animal phenotypes. Interestingly, since the components of beebread/pollen are mainly plant materials and royal jelly is a glandular secretion of nurse bees, the diets for worker- and queen-destined larvae are differentially derived from plant- and animal-sources. Therefore, Xi Chen, Chen-Yu Zhang and colleagues decide to investigate if miRNAs from different larval diets may have distinct impacts on honeybee development.
Here, they report that plant miRNAs are more enriched in beebread/pollen than in royal jelly. While plant miRNAs of beebread/pollen are fed to larvae, they cause developmental delay and reductions in body and ovary size in honeybees; in contrast, miRNAs in the royal jelly are not sufficient to reach a functional level, therefore queen-destined larvae evade this regulation. Mechanistic studies reveal that amTOR, a stimulatory gene in caste differentiation, is the direct target of miR162a. Interestingly, ingested plant miRNAs have a similar inhibitory effect on fruit fly development, even though fruit fly is not a social insect. In summary, this study uncovers a new mechanism that plant miRNAs in larval diet of worker bees delay caste differentiation and keep ovaries inactive, thereby inducing sterile worker bees.
The findings of this study are important for the following reasons:
Read full article at: Cross-kingdom regulation of honeybee caste development by dietary plant miRNAs — Save The Bees Concert
03 Monday Jul 2017
Posted in beekeeping, honey bee biology, honey bee genetics
In my previous blog, I spoke about the Kinship theory. This theory states that the more relatedness there is between a group of individuals, the more likely to exhibit altruistic behavior the individuals are to be. Honeybee sisters share 75% of the same genetic material. This genetic similarity is what drives the honeybees to take […]
Read more here: Honey Bee Genetics — by deltavalleyapiary
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