Group size influences maternal provisioning and compensatory larval growth in honeybees

Bin Han; Esmaeil Amiri; Qiaohong Wei; David R Tarpy; Micheline K Strand; Shufa Xu; Olav Rueppell

doi:10.1016/j.isci.2023.108546

Group size influences maternal provisioning and compensatory larval growth in honeybees

iScience. 2023 Nov 23;26(12):108546. doi: 10.1016/j.isci.2023.108546. eCollection 2023 Dec 15.

Authors

Bin Han¹, Esmaeil Amiri², Qiaohong Wei¹, David R Tarpy³, Micheline K Strand⁴, Shufa Xu¹, Olav Rueppell^{5

6}

Affiliations

¹ State Key Laboratory of Resource Insects, Institute of Apicultural Research, Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, Beijing 100193, China.
² Delta Research and Extension Center, Mississippi State University, Stoneville, MS 38776, USA.
³ Department of Applied Ecology, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC 27695-7617, USA.
⁴ Biological and Biotechnology Sciences, Army Research Office, Army Research Laboratory, Research Triangle Park, Durham, NC 27709, USA.
⁵ Department of Biological Sciences, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta T6G2R3, Canada.
⁶ Department of Biology, University of North Carolina, Greensboro, NC 27402, USA.

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.

Keywords: Entomology; Evolutionary biology; Molecular biology.