Honey bees are what they eat: how do differing diets result in queens or workers? Paul Hurd

A lecture given by Paul Hurd at the 2021 National Honey Show entitled “Honey bees are what they eat: how do differing diets result in queens or workers?”. The National Honey Show gratefully acknowledge the Worshipful Company of Wax Chandlers for their support and Middlesex Beekeepers for their sponsorship.
Honey bee larvae destined to become workers are fed worker jelly followed by a diet of nectar/pollen and those destined to become queens are fed royal jelly. These differing diets are then maintained over the entire lifetime of the adult. The ability of an individual honey bee larva to become a queen or worker cannot be because of different DNA: the genome of that larva has the capacity to become either, it is due to the way genes are switched on or off in response to the specific diet; this determines such differing developmental outcomes. Epigenetics is a dynamic set of instructions that exist ‘on top’ of the genetic information, that can encode and direct multiple different outcomes from a fixed DNA sequence. Epigenetic information can be altered by environmental factors, including diet. In the case of the honey bee, the queen larvae are fed a diet of royal jelly, a potent substance capable of changing developmental instructions. I will discuss the very latest advances in scientific technology that have allowed us to investigate how royal jelly results in a queen and why workers are different.
Paul Hurd obtained his PhD from the University of Sheffield and performed post-doctoral research at Kings College London and at the Gurdon Institute, University of Cambridge. He is currently a Principal Investigator, Group Leader and Senior Lecturer in Epigenetics at Queen Mary University of London. His research group work on the honey bee as an emerging model for epigenetics and are particularly interested in how diet can result in three different outcomes (queens, workers and drones) from the same honey bee genome. His lab was the first to show that honey bee castes differ epigenetically, rather than genetically. They manage and maintain their own research hives and work in his lab is funded by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council, Royal Society and the European Union.

[@rosem7042]

These lectures are trus hidden gems of TH-cam.

[@HerbertSenft1993]

By far the most interesting part of this presentation was in the final Q&A period. I wish that had continued much longer. Fascinating.

[@mikeshaw8744]

It's worth watching to the end. There's some practical information sprinkled all throughout