THEY have a complex social life,

highly sophisticated ways of

communicating and a remarkable

memory. No mean feat when you

consider that a honeybee’s brain is

100,000 times as small as ours.

They even operate a caste system

with division of labour. A better

understanding of how the honeybee

does all this should come with

the sequencing of its genome –

all 1.8 billion base pairs of it.

The honeybee (Apis mellifera)

is the third insect, after the fruit fly

and mosquito, to get its genome

sequenced, and a comparison with

those insects has already thrown up

surprises (Nature, vol 443, p 931).

For a start, the honeybee genome

has evolved more slowly compared

to mosquitoes and fruit flies. But the

rate of genetic recombination – the

shuffling of maternal and paternal

genes into new combinations – is

nearly 10 times that so far discovered

in any animal, including humans

(Genome Research, vol 16, p 1339).

Since the queen reproduces

for the entire hive, she generates

relatively low levels of genetic

diversity compared to solitary insects.

The boosted rates of genetic

shuffling may compensate for this.

However, “we don’t know whether

the honeybee genome is evolving

relatively slowly or the fruit fly

genome is evolving relatively

rapidly”, says Gene Robinson,

an entomologist at the University

of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign,

who was one of the leaders of the

honeybee genome project.

The honeybee has 170 genes for

odour receptors, far more than the

fruit fly’s 62 or the mosquito’s 79.

The difference reflects honeybees’

sophisticated chemical signalling

within the hive. “Each hive smells a

little bit different,” says Greg Hunt,

a behavioural geneticist at Purdue

University in West Lafayette, Indiana.

Guard bees will repel bees with

unfamiliar odours, preventing them

from robbing the hive. In contrast,

honeybees have just 10 taste

receptors compared with about 70

in the other insects, perhaps because

pollen and nectar are less likely to

contain toxins.

The bee genome has relatively

few genes governing its immune

response. This is unexpected because

densely packed honeybee colonies

should be ideal breeding grounds

for diseases. The bees may instead

rely on behavioural methods to keep

diseases down, says Robinson. For

example, sick bees usually leave the

hive to die alone, and workers smell

out and remove infected larvae from

their brood cells – another function

for the rich repertoire of odour

receptors. Bob Holmes ●

Honeybees do the gene shuffle again

www.newscientist.com 28 October 2006 | NewScientist | 13

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