What is royal jelly and why do only queen bees eat it


Some people believe that the bitter-tasting, nontoxic royal jelly is a healthful component of the human diet, but scientific studies do not support that belief. But for a female honey bee, it makes the difference between developing into a queen or becoming an ordinary worker. A fertile queen and a sterile worker have the same genetic makeup (genotype), but they have very different traits (phenotype). The queen bee is large, mates and lays thousands of eggs, and can live for several years; a typical female worker bee has a reproductive system that never develops, is considerably smaller than the queen, and generally lives only several weeks. These differences occur, as the saying goes, because "you are what you eat."

Instead of being fed the usual brood food and bee bread, like a larva that is destined to become an ordinary worker, a larva that will become a queen is fed a substance, called royal jelly, that has a different chemical composition. Any female larva can become a queen if she is cared for properly by being fed royal jelly during the early stage of larval life. In the bee, the royal jelly causes a group of genes to be activated differently than they would be on a worker's diet, resulting in significant physical and behavioral differences. Hormones also function differently in the queen than in an ordinary female worker.

When the worker bees sense that the colony's resident queen is failing, they respond by creating some larger-than-usual cells, called queen cups, in the brood comb and encouraging her to lay eggs in them, so they can begin to rear a few new queens. A new queen must quickly supercede or replace the old queen if the colony is to survive.

The worker bees produce royal jelly from a specialized gland (the hypopharyngeal gland) in the head, and they deposit a steady supply of it into the especially large cell where the queen larva is developing. Royal jelly is a thick, milky fluid with the consistency of plain yogurt, and it contains more protein and sugar than the food given to worker bee larvae.

Royal jelly consists of approximately 12 percent sugar compared to about 4 percent in worker larvae food, and the queen larva is visited by nurse bees approximately 1,600 times, compared to 150 visits to a worker larva per day. These qualitative and quantitative differences produce dramatic results, and by the end of the larval stage, the queen is larger and heavier, she has a higher metabolic rate, and she has fifteen times the level of growthstimulating juvenile hormone than that found in worker larvae at that stage.

Royal jelly also contains vitellogenin, an egg yolk precursor whose synthesis was investigated by Preeyada Koywiwattrakul, Graham Thompson, Sririporn Sitthipraneed, Benjamin Oldroyd, and Ryzard Maleszka. The activity of the vitellogenin gene was found to be diminished or stimulated depending on the development of the ovaries. When groups of caged, queenless worker bees were treated with carbon dioxide (as is used as temporary anesthesia for artificial insemination of honey bee queens), they showed low levels of ovarian development as compared to controls that were not given the carbon dioxide treatment.

The bees with inhibited ovaries had lower levels of expression of the vitellogenin gene. This finding may be of interest in understanding the regulation of sterility in worker bees. A queen's ovaries do not become completely activated until she mates, so when a virgin queen has been instrumentally inseminated, she is temporarily anesthetized with carbon dioxide, which stimulates her ovaries.

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This article was sent to us by: Silvester Dellington at 08172010

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