>> Perhaps I'm missing something, but this paper seems irrelevant to the issue of worker/queen divergence.

In the abstract:
> Our results suggest that this mechanism may play a role in honey bee 
> queen–worker differentiation and worker division of labor, both of 
> which are related to the responses to _nutritional stress_

But what they actually did in that study was starve the larvae in the 5th Instar, long after the queen/worker divergence has occurred.  The work here was with workers only.

> They go on to say:
> In honey bees, the quality and quantity of food ingested by female larvae is controlled by nurse bees. Food intake results in the differential development of adult queens or workers (Atkins et al., 1975; Page, 2013)....

Page made it clear that the difference between a queen and a worker is food QUALITY, not quantity, and the "Atkins" cite is just the Dadant Beekeeping Supply Catalog's hobbyist reference "The Hive and the Honeybee", 1975 edition

The cite to "Page" is from his book "The Spirit of the Hive: the Mechanisms of Social Evolution".  I will copy and paste from the 2012 uncorrected proof pdf:

To summarize Page: queens get more sugar in their diet, and although "day 3 worker larvae" are physically larger than "day 3 queen larvae", (proving that workers are anything but starved), queens have distinctly different hormone levels from the start.

Pg 194: " Here it is important to note that for decades apicultural researchers have led a quest to find a special substance that is added only to the food of queens that is responsible for “unlocking” a developmental program or throws a developmental switch that results in the production of the
queen phenotype. This quest has had many twists and turns. The most recent special substance, royalactin, was proposed by Masaki Kamukura to be one of the major royal jelly proteins found in brood food. In an elegant study, he showed that royalactin is necessary to make a queen.
However, although it may be necessary for developing a queen, it does not qualitatively differentiate queen from worker development because it is fed in the same proportion to developing worker larvae. Today, after at least 60 years of the quest, the only consistent and independently confirmed result is that the food of worker and queen larvae differs ***IN THE AMOUNT OF SUGAR*** it contains." [emphasis added by jhf]

"Sugar acts as a phagostimulant, causing the larvae to eat more, but it also probably increases metabolism and the production of juvenile hormone (JH), a growth- regulating hormone found in all insects. During the first two days of larval development, the queen larvae respond to the extra sugar in their food with elevated respiration but do not grow faster than worker larvae. In fact, ***BY DAY THREE, THE WORKER LARVAE ARE LARGER THAT THE QUEEN LARVAE***, probably because ***THEY BOTH HAVE ACCESS TO THE SAME QUANTITIES OF FOOD***, but queens have higher metabolism. JH titers are elevated in queen larvae relative to worker larvae throughout larval development. Sugar concentration goes up in worker food aft er the fourth instar; it is necessary for them to pupate." [emphasis added by jhf]


The figure from the book and the original figure from the paper Page co-authored are both attached.

But the bottom line here is that queens are made with a distinctly different diet from that of workers, and the term "nutritional stress" has no relevance to any explanation of  the worker/queen differentiation in development. 



             ***********************************************
The BEE-L mailing list is powered by L-Soft's renowned
LISTSERV(R) list management software.  For more information, go to:
http://www.lsoft.com/LISTSERV-powered.html