Anniversary of a beekeeper’s discovery of thelytoky in Cape honey bees

Significance: The laying workers of the Cape honey bee continue to negatively affect the South African beekeeping industry, with more losses suffered in the northern regions of the country. The reproductive parasites enter susceptible host colonies, activate their ovaries, and lay diploid eggs, leading to colony dwindling and collapse. Diploidy in eggs produced by unmated laying workers arises from thelytokous parthenogenesis, first discovered in honey bees by a hobbyist beekeeper. We examine the consequences of thelytokous parthenogenesis and outline what is being done to understand and limit the spread of the laying workers of the Cape honey bee

The transcriptomic changes associated with the development of social parasitism in the honeybee Apis mellifera capensis

Supplementary material: Online Resource 1 (XLSX 15 kb) Online Resource 2 (XLSX 13 kb) Online Resource 3 (PDF 268 kb) Online Resource 4 (XLSX 14 kb) Online Resource 5 (XLSX 29 kb)Social insects are characterized by the division of labor. Queens usually dominate reproduction, whereas workers fulfill non-reproductive age-dependent tasks to maintain the colony. Although workers are typically sterile, they can activate their ovaries to produce their own offspring. In the extreme, worker reproduction can turn into social parasitism as in Apis mellifera capensis. These intraspecific parasites occupy a host colony, kill the resident queen, and take over the reproductive monopoly. Because they exhibit a queenlike behavior and are also treated like queens by the fellow workers, they are so-called pseudoqueens. Here, we compare the development of parasitic pseudoqueens and social workers at different time points using fat body transcriptome data. Two complementary analysis methods—a principal component analysis and a time course analysis—led to the identification of a core set of genes involved in the transition from a social worker into a highly fecund parasitic pseudoqueen. Comparing our results on pseudoqueens with gene expression data of honeybee queens revealed many similarities. In addition, there was a set of specific transcriptomic changes in the parasitic pseudoqueens that differed from both, queens and social workers, which may be typical for the development of the social parasitism in A. m. capensis.The Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (RFAM).http://link.springer.com/journal/1142019-04-01hj2018Zoology and Entomolog