Scientists have decoded the DNA of the Western honeybee, a feat that researchers say could help illuminate the genetic underpinnings of social behavior.
An international team of nearly 200 scientists reported today that they had identified 10,157 genes. That's fewer than those in the genomes of the fruit fly, mosquito or silkworm, but sufficient to produce the only non-primate species that communicates through a symbolic language.
The genome of \o7Apis mellifera \f7was published in the journal Nature, along with a series of accompanying articles in Science, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and other scholarly journals.
"Honeybees are important models to study the regulation and evolution of life in a society, especially social behavior itself," said team co-leader Gene Robinson, director of the neuroscience program at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
"We hope to extrapolate the biology to humans," added Saurabh Sinha, a computer science professor at Urbana-Champaign who led one of the companion studies about genes involved in social behavior.
A typical honeybee begins its career in the hive, caring for eggs and larvae. After about two or three weeks, environmental cues from the colony turn on thousands of dormant brain genes and silence thousands of others. That prompts the bee to leave the nest in search of nectar and pollen, the researchers reported.
When a new food source is discovered, returning bees perform a "waggle dance" to tell other hive members how to find it. If more foragers are needed, bees execute a "shaking dance," and if they need to recruit more food handlers, they initiate a "tremble dance."
Honeybees use pheromones to keep track of the social standing of fellow colony members and differentiate between kin and outsiders. Compared with other insects, the researchers found, honeybees have more genes devoted to sensing smells. But they have fewer genes for taste, perhaps because they tend to eat where other bees ate and therefore don't need as much sensitivity for detecting poisons, scientists theorized.
The researchers were surprised to find that honeybees had relatively few genes for regulating immunity despite living in cramped quarters where disease might easily spread. Perhaps the bee society works to minimize incursions from parasites and pathogens, possibly by having members groom one another, Robinson said.
