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Informed Discussion of Beekeeping Issues and Bee Biology

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Informed Discussion of Beekeeping Issues and Bee Biology <[log in to unmask]>
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Wed, 28 Nov 2018 10:26:02 -0500
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> As I said, all it would take would be one simple experiment to test the hypothesis...


> We reared larvae in vitro on two discrete quantities of food, but we ended up with adult females that were more variable than colony-reared queens and workers, indicating that nurse bees are better at regulating expressed queen–worker dimorphism than we are. By feeding larvae continuously (instead of a single time in our in vitro protocol), nurse workers can tightly regulate available food over the course of development. Nurse workers can also regulate development by removing individuals that express intermediate phenotypes, so that only discrete queen and worker phenotypes are produced. Thus, under natural colony conditions, only the extreme ends of the full phenotypic space are normally expressed, and the relationship between body size and ovary size that we observed in vitro is typically suppressed.

Linksvayer, Timothy A., et al. "Larval and nurse worker control of developmental plasticity and the evolution of honey bee queen–worker dimorphism." Journal of evolutionary biology 24.9 (2011): 1939-1948.

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