WHATS THE ESSENCE OF ROYALTY - ONE KETO GROUP

A honey bee colony consists of a single queen, tens of thousands of ne arly sterile female workers and usually a few hundred drones. The pres ence of the queen inhibits rearing of new queens, stimulates foraging and interaction of workers with the queen and, (along with the queen's brood), inhibits the development of worker ovaries. Most or all of th ese effects of the queen on the workers are mediated through primer ph eromones secreted by the queen. An important component of the queen's pheromone blend is 9-keto-(E) 2-decenoic acid (9-ODA). Workers also pr oduce related substances which appear to function as nutrients and foo d preservatives. A dominant component of the worker blend is a diacid which is made from a precursor molecule hydroxylated at the omega carb on atom rather than at the omega-1 carbon atom. The omega-1 precursor is used by the queen which leads to the formation of a keto acid. One might say that the fundamental difference between a queen and worker, the essence of royalty is therefore, one keto group! The recently-eluc idated caste-specific biosynthetic pathway for the production of these pheromones permits two other speculations. One is that workers can be thought of as being closer to the ancestral solitary condition and th at queens can be thought of as a derived invention of sociality. The o ther is that, compared to non-social species, social insects are espec ially predisposed to evolve novel structures and characters as exempli fied by the queen for example, through the process of evolution of gen e duplication.