Brainwashed worker-bees ensure dominance of queen

Queen honeybees rule over a "Brave New World" society where their workers are literally brainwashed to behave, scientists have learned.

The queen exerts her power by producing an aromatic chemical that inhibits negative tendencies in the young nurse drones who feed and groom her.

By preventing them from acquiring aggressive traits, she ensures her own dominance and that the hive remains a haven of order, peace and harmony.

Effectively, the pheromone chemical keeps the drones innocently enslaved to the queen.

The brainwashing compound controls learned aggressive behaviour in the naive young bees and avoids conflict, researchers from New Zealand reported in the journal Science.

Caste systems are already well known in populations of ants, bees, wasps and termites, but the kind of brainwashing that is seen in honeybees takes behaviour control among social insects to a new level.

The Queen honeybee produces a pheromone from her mandibles that containing a complex cocktail of chemicals developed to enslave the entire hive.

One of these, a compound called homovanillyl alcohol (HVA), is used by the queen to brainwash her slaves, said the New Zealand team led by Dr Vanina Vergoz, from the University of Otago in Dunedin.

The chemical blocks "aversive learning" - the acquisition of negative memories which would normally trigger an aggressive "sting reflex" in the bees.

In tests, young bees were taught to associate a particular odour with an electric shock. Thereafter when they were exposed to the odour, they unsheathed their stings - but not if they had first been exposed to the queen bee's mandibular pheromone.

Bees given a sniff of the pheromone remained docile and submissive, and kept their stings unextended.

Only young "nurse" drones in close proximity to the queen were affected. As the workers matured and ventured out of the hive to forage for nectar, they became free from the queen's control and learned to defend themselves against dangers.

"This is... significant, as it ensures that this important survival tool can benefit workers and contribute ultimately to the survival of the colony as a whole," the authors of the report wrote.

A neurobiologist commenting on the findings in Science said he was reminded of Aldous Huxley's 1932 novel "Brave New World", in which people are conditioned from birth to perform different roles in society.

Dr Giovanni Galizia, a researcher from the University of Konstanz in Germany, wrote: "Among other things, lower castes are programmed not to be aggressive against higher caste members. A treatment with neurotoxic chemicals (including alcohol) during development leads to the appropriate brain changes."

Interesting? Click here to explore further