Meeting Abstract
The importance of diet and nutrition on morphology, physiology and behavior has been well studied in honey bees, especially in the context of division of labor. The task of queen tending (feeding, examining, and grooming the queen) is integral to the health of honey bee colony and natural variation in response to the queen exists amongst the workers of a honey bee colony. This variation in response may lead to an increased of division of labor (specific individuals are more likely to respond to, and thus care for, the queen). These types of variations in response to stimuli can benefit the entire colony. Is it possible that a worker’s pollen consumption (her source of protein) can affect her likeliness to care for the queen? We found evidence that a worker’s diet as an adult (with or without pollen) affects her responsiveness to queen pheromone. Bees that had pollen-deficient diets displayed an increased response to queen pheromone. Additionally, we manipulated the diversity of pollen that larval honey bees had access to during development, and found that the nutritional environment of worker larvae can have long term effects on her response to queen pheromone as an adult. Honey bee workers are sterile, but have some reproductive potential, and can lay eggs of their own if the queen dies. Differences in pollen diets may lead to differences in reproductive potential (by way of contributing to ovarian development) and may lead to these differences in response to the dominant reproductive individual. Because there is likely variation in how much pollen workers of the same hive have access to and ingest, this variation in diet may have the effect of contributing to the division of labor of the colony. Variation is important to maintain a division of labor, so this variation in pollen-diet/queen-response likely has beneficial properties for the entire colony.
