Honey bee queen mandibular pheromone inhibits ovary development and fecundity in a fruit fly
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract A key feature of eusocial insects is their reproductive division of labour. The queen signals her fecundity to her potentially reproductive daughters via a pheromone, which renders them sterile. In contrast, solitary insects lack division in reproductive labour and there is no such social signalling or need for ovary‐regulating pheromones. Nonetheless, females from both non‐social and eusocial lineages are expected to regulate their ovaries to maximize inclusive lifetime reproductive success. It is not known, however, whether the underlying networks that regulate ovary activation are homologous between non‐social and eusocial taxa, especially when these taxa are phylogenetically distant. In this study, we provide evidence that solitary fruit flies may share a conserved ovary‐regulating pathway with a eusocial honey bee, A pis mellifera L . ( H ymenoptera: A pidae). Specifically, we demonstrate that honey bee queen mandibular pheromone ( QMP ) inhibits fly ovaries in much the same way as it suppresses worker ovaries. D rosophila melanogaster M eigen ( D iptera: D rosophilidae) exposed to sufficient doses of QMP showed a reduction in ovary size, produced fewer eggs, and generated fewer viable offspring, relative to unexposed controls. D rosophila melanogaster therefore responds to an interspecific social cue to which it would not normally be exposed. Although we cannot strictly rule out an incidental effect, this conspicuous response suggests that these two species may share an underlying mechanism for ovary regulation. Why a non‐social species of fly responds to a highly social bee's pheromone is not clear, but one possibility is that solitary and social insects share pathways associated with female reproduction, as predicted by the ‘groundplan’ hypothesis of social evolution.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 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) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
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 teacher head, 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".