ArticleiScience2023
Group size influences maternal provisioning and compensatory larval growth in honeybees.
Article in iScience, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 3 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
3 citing papers in PubMed, 6 citations in OpenAlex.
- Body Size and Body Weight inLife (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Article
- Conserved cellular signals and mechanisms accompany the reproductive shutdown of honey bee (Apis mellifera) queens for dispersal.Communications biology · 2026Article
- Honey bee egg composition changes seasonally and after acute maternal virus infection.Scientific reports · 2025Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
7 authors at 4 institutions in 3 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Environmental variation selects for the adaptive plasticity of maternal provisioning. Even though developing honeybees find themselves in a protected colony environment, their reproductively specialized queens actively adjust their maternal investment, even among worker-destined eggs. However, the potentially adaptive consequences of this flexible provisioning strategy and their mechanistic basis are unknown. Under natural conditions, we find that the body size of larvae hatching from small eggs in large colonies converges with that of initially larger larvae hatching from large eggs typically produced in small colonies. However, large eggs confer a persistent body size advantage when small and large eggs are cross-fostered in small and large colonies, respectively. We substantiate the increased maternal investment by identifying growth-promoting metabolomes and proteomes in large eggs compared to small eggs, which are primarily enriched in amino acid metabolism and cell maturation. Thus, our study provides a comprehensive adaptive explanation for the worker egg size plasticity of honeybees.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.