Introduction: the Castes of the Honey Bee
A honey bee colony is typically composed of three types phenotypically distinct kinds of adults: a single queen, a few hundred drones (depending on season), and tens of thousands of workers. While the drones are haploid males (not a caste) originating from unfertilized eggs, the fertilized, diploid eggs – heterozygous at the sex locus – give rise to either of the two female castes. A female larva is initially a bipotent individual without a fixed caste fate. Rather, the caste phenotype of a female honey bee is gradually determined during larval development. Hence, the queen/worker dimorphism is the result of developmental plasticity, the capacity of a single individual genotype to respond to environmental signals and, consequentially, give rise to divergent (alternative) phenotypes through bifurcating sequential developmental decisions.
In honey bees – genus Apis, of which the most studied is the western honey bee A. mellifera– the critical...
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Cervoni, M.S., Hartfelder, K. (2021). Caste Differentiation: Honey Bees. In: Starr, C.K. (eds) Encyclopedia of Social Insects. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-28102-1_151
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