New components of the honey bee ( <i>Apis mellifera</i> L.) queen retinue pheromone
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The honey bee queen produces pheromones that function in both releaser and primer roles such as attracting a retinue of workers around her, attracting drones on mating flights, preventing workers from reproducing at the individual (worker egg-laying) and colony (swarming) level, and regulating several other aspects of colony functioning. The queen mandibular pheromone (QMP), consisting of five synergistic components, is the only pheromone chemically identified in the honey bee (Apis mellifera L.) queen, but this pheromone does not fully duplicate the pheromonal activity of a full queen extract. To identify the remaining unknown compounds for retinue attraction, honey bee colonies were selectively bred to have low response to synthetic QMP and high response to a queen extract in a laboratory retinue bioassay. Workers from these colonies were then used in the bioassay to guide the isolation and identification of the remaining active components. Four new compounds were identified from several glandular sources that account for the majority of the difference in retinue attraction between synthetic QMP and queen extract: methyl (Z)-octadec-9-enoate (methyl oleate), (E)-3-(4-hydroxy-3-methoxyphenyl)-prop-2-en-1-ol (coniferyl alcohol), hexadecan-1-ol, and (Z9,Z12,Z15)-octadeca-9,12,15-trienoic acid (linolenic acid). These compounds were inactive alone or in combination, and they only elicited attraction in the presence of QMP. There was still unidentified activity remaining in the queen extract. The queen therefore produces a synergistic, multiglandular pheromone blend of at least nine compounds for retinue attraction, the most complex pheromone blend known for inducing a single behavior in any organism.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".