ArticlePLoS biology2008
Effects of selection for honey bee worker reproduction on foraging traits.
Article in PLoS biology, 2008. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 16 papers.
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Who cites it
16 citing papers in PubMed, 48 citations in OpenAlex.
- Post-Reproductive Lifespan in Honey Bee Workers with Varying Life Expectancies.Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2025Article
- Morphology of Nasonov and Tergal Glands inInsects · 2022Article
- Bumble Bee (Integrative organismal biology (Oxford, England) · 2022Article
- Genomic Signals of Adaptation towards Mutualism and Sociality in Two Ambrosia Beetle Complexes.Life (Basel, Switzerland) · 2018Article
- Honeybee rebel workers invest less in risky foraging than normal workers.Scientific reports · 2018Article
- Ovary activation does not correlate with pollen and nectar foraging specialization in the bumblebeePeerJ · 2018Article
- The dynamic association between ovariole loss and sterility in adult honeybee workers.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2017Article
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- Evolution of Self-Organized Task Specialization in Robot Swarms.PLoS computational biology · 2015Article
- At the brink of eusociality: transcriptomic correlates of worker behaviour in a small carpenter bee.BMC evolutionary biology · 2014Article
- Social molecular pathways and the evolution of bee societies.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2011Review
- Support for the reproductive ground plan hypothesis of social evolution and major QTL for ovary traits of Africanized worker honey bees (Apis mellifera L.).BMC evolutionary biology · 2011Article
- Genotype effect on regulation of behaviour by vitellogenin supports reproductive origin of honeybee foraging bias.Animal behaviour · 2010Article
- The developmental genetics and physiology of honeybee societies.Animal behaviour · 2010Article
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Authors and funding
2 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The "reproductive ground plan" hypothesis (RGPH) proposes that reproductive division of labour in social insects had its antecedents in the ancient gene regulatory networks that evolved to regulate the foraging and reproductive phases of their solitary ancestors. Thus, queens express traits that are characteristic of the reproductive phase of solitary insects, whereas workers express traits characteristic of the foraging phase. The RGPH has also been extended to help understand the regulation of age polyethism within the worker caste and more recently to explain differences in the foraging specialisations of individual honey bee workers. Foragers that specialise in collecting proteinaceous pollen are hypothesised to have higher reproductive potential than individuals that preferentially forage for nectar because genes that were ancestrally associated with the reproductive phase are active. We investigated the links between honey bee worker foraging behaviour and reproductive traits by comparing the foraging preferences of a line of workers that has been selected for high rates of worker reproduction with the preferences of wild-type bees. We show that while selection for reproductive behaviour in workers has not altered foraging preferences, the age at onset of foraging of our selected line has been increased. Our findings therefore support the hypothesis that age polyethism is related to the reproductive ground plan, but they cast doubt on recent suggestions that foraging preferences and reproductive traits are pleiotropically linked.
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