ArticleProceedings. Biological sciences2019
Honeybees possess a structurally diverse and functionally redundant set of queen pheromones.
Article in Proceedings. Biological sciences, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 18 papers.
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Who cites it
18 citing papers in PubMed.
- The Morphological Characteristics of Mandibular Glands and Tergal Glands in Asian Honeybee (Insects · 2026Article
- Microbial Succession on Honey Bee Body Surfaces Reflects Behavioral Maturation.Microorganisms · 2026Article
- Pheromone and morphometric features of honey bee (Apis mellifera) queens imported to Canada from around the globe.PloS one · 2026Article
- Age and QMP exposure affect the nutritional preferences of cagedApidologie · 2026Article
- The Pheromone Landscape ofMolecules (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Review
- Pheromone relay networks in the honeybee: messenger workers distribute the queen's fertility signal throughout the hive.BMC biology · 2024Article
- Pathogen-Mediated Alterations of Insect Chemical Communication: From Pheromones to Behavior.Pathogens (Basel, Switzerland) · 2023Review
- A real-time feedback system stabilises the regulation of worker reproduction under various colony sizes.PLoS computational biology · 2023Article
- Expression of subunits of an insecticide target receptor varies across tissues, life stages, castes, and species of social bees.Molecular ecology · 2023Article
- Compression principle and Zipf's Law of brevity in infochemical communication.Biology letters · 2022Article
- Honeybee queen mandibular pheromone fails to regulate ovary activation in the common wasp.Journal of comparative physiology. A, Neuroethology, sensory, neural, and behavioral physiology · 2022Article
- Reproductive fitness of honey bee queens exposed to thiamethoxam during development.Veterinary pathology · 2021Article
- Cuticular and Dufour's Gland Chemistry Reflect Reproductive and Social State in the Facultatively Eusocial Sweat Bee Megalopta genalis (Hymenoptera: Halictidae).Journal of chemical ecology · 2021Article
- Effects of juvenile hormone in fertility and fertility-signaling in workers of the common wasp Vespula vulgaris.PloS one · 2021Article
- Reproduction and signals regulating worker policing under identical hormonal control in social wasps.Scientific reports · 2020Article
- Identification of a queen pheromone mediating the rearing of adult sexuals in the pharaoh antBiology letters · 2020Article
- Genome Architecture Facilitates Phenotypic Plasticity in the Honeybee (Apis mellifera).Molecular biology and evolution · 2020Article
- Honeybees possess a structurally diverse and functionally redundant set of queen pheromones.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2019Article
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6 authors.
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Abstract
Queen pheromones, which signal the presence of a fertile queen and induce workers to remain sterile, play a key role in regulating reproductive division of labour in insect societies. In the honeybee, volatiles produced by the queen's mandibular glands have been argued to act as the primary sterility-inducing pheromones. This contrasts with evidence from other groups of social insects, where specific queen-characteristic hydrocarbons present on the cuticle act as conserved queen signals. This led us to hypothesize that honeybee queens might also employ cuticular pheromones to stop workers from reproducing. Here, we support this hypothesis with the results of bioassays with synthetic blends of queen-characteristic alkenes, esters and carboxylic acids. We show that all these compound classes suppress worker ovary development, and that one of the blends of esters that we used was as effective as the queen mandibular pheromone (QMP) mix. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the two main QMP compounds 9-ODA and 9-HDA tested individually were as effective as the blend of all four major QMP compounds, suggesting considerable signal redundancy. Possible adaptive reasons for the observed complexity of the honeybee queen signal mix are discussed.
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