Meeting Abstract
Nutrition heavily influences the physiology of developing organisms. In social insects, larval nutrition regulates profound phenotypic differences such as caste determination, as well as sublet differences in metabolism and health. Worker honeybees provision brood with a secretion from their mandibular and hypopharyngeal glands, which is called jelly. The nutritional content of these glandular secretions is a result of external factors such as forage and internal factors such as worker behavior, resulting in jellies that vary significantly in protein, sugar and water content. Systematic manipulations of larval diet in vivo will determine to what extent variation in Royal Jelly content affects within caste and between caste development. We manipulated a standard artificial diet for in vitro rearing and measured the phenotypic affects. The factorial design use nine diets that varied in the amount of sugar and royal jelly. We reared 24 larvae per diet and measured larval growth and length of each developmental stage. These results have implications for honeybee growth when foraging sources are limited or under monoculture cultivation.
