Differences in honeybee queen pheromones revealed by LC-MS/MS: Reassessing the honest signal hypothesis
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The honest signal hypothesis posits that social insect queens emit pheromonal signals that convey information about fecundity, which workers use to make decisions around investing in direct or indirect fitness. We used liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry to measure honeybee ( Apis mellifera ) queen retinue pheromone (QRP) in relation to age, laying status, and acceptance using a protocol that enables concurrent metabolomic and lipidomic analyses. Older queens produced higher levels of the QRP components 9-R-hydroxydec-2(E)-enoic acid (9(R)-HDA), linolenic acid (LEA), and 4-hydroxy-3-methoxyphenylethanol (HVA) compared to younger queens, with HVA also correlating with ovary mass. However, ovary mass was not an influential metric for worker decision-making around queen acceptance; therefore, the relationship between HVA and ovary mass is merely an "honest signal" of a non-influential metric. Parallel metabolomic and lipidomic analyses showed that samples cluster according to queen age and mating status, but not ovary mass, revealing many other physiological changes occurring in the queen's early life.
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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 | 0.001 |
| 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".