Division of labour—individuals specializing in different activities—features prominently in the
spectacular success of the social insects. Until recently, genetic and genomic analyses of …

Recent evidence for genetic effects on royal and worker caste differentiation from diverse
social insect taxa has put an end to the view that these phenotypes stem solely from a …

Comprising a substantial part of living biomass on earth, ants are integral to the functioning
of terrestrial ecosystems. More than 12,000 species have been described to date, and it is …

Recent major losses of managed honeybee, Apis mellifera, colonies at a global scale have
resulted in a multitude of research efforts to identify the underlying mechanisms. Numerous …

The evolution of eusociality is a perennial issue in evolutionary biology, and genomic
advances have fueled steadily growing interest in the genetic changes underlying social …

Polyphenism is the phenomenon in which alternative phenotypes are produced by a single
genotype in response to environmental cues. An extreme case is found in social insects, in …

Behaviour is typically regarded as among the most flexible of animal phenotypic traits. In
particular, expression of cooperative behaviour is often assumed to be conditional upon the …

Most of the studies on royal jelly (RJ) composition or properties as well as quality standards
of commercially available royal jelly are based on RJ harvested three days (72 h) after …

Sexual selection is currently the target of multiple and controversial theoretical and
experimental studies. Selection on mating and post-mating patterns can result from several …

Recently there has been an explosion of research into the genetics of caste determination,
especially following the discovery of systems where queen-worker caste determination has …