LAUSANNE, SWITZERLAND – I’ll never look at my garden bees in the same way again, knowing what those queen sweat bees are up to. Researchers at the University of Lausanne have shown that queen bees limit the food their first batch of daughters receive. The first brood remains small, workers who help raise the second group, which are then well positioned to reproduce.
This division of labour is slightly spooky and reminiscent of the film “Antz” but there seems to be some logic to it.
Science journal Frontiers in Zoology today reports that the Lausanne team of Nayuta Brand and Michel Chapuisat “investigated whether mothers restrict the food available to their first brood in order to ensure that they become workers because they are small sized, possibly easier to dominate, and so less likely to reproduce. They found that the total amount of pollen and nectar supplied to the first brood was significantly less that to the second brood – in fact the second brood received 1.4 times the amount of provisions than the first.”