Skip to content
NatureHQ

Study

Nutritional control of reproductive status in honeybees via DNA methylation

Kucharski, Ryszard; Maleszka, Judyta; Foret, Sylvain; Maleszka, Ryszard

Science, 2008

Peer-reviewedcontrolled laboratory experimentlaboratory

What they did

Honey bee larvae destined to become workers had the gene for a DNA methyltransferase silenced by RNA interference, and the caste they developed into was recorded against untreated controls on the same diet.

Studied in
Apis mellifera
Sample size
larvae with a DNA methyltransferase silenced by RNA interference

What they found

Silencing the methyltransferase in worker-destined larvae produced adults with queen characteristics — developed ovaries and queen-like morphology — without any change to their diet.

What it means

The authors' reading, and ours. Where they differ, that difference is the point.

How the authors put it

Royal jelly directs caste development by altering DNA methylation, and removing the methylation machinery mimics the royal-jelly signal.

How NatureHQ reads it

This is what makes caste in honey bees genuinely interesting rather than a curiosity about diet. A queen and a worker are genetically identical; what differs is which genes are switched on, and the switch is chemical marking of the DNA driven by what the larva is fed. The experiment is elegant because it works backwards — instead of feeding royal jelly and observing a queen, it removes the machinery royal jelly acts through and gets a queen anyway, on ordinary food.

Limitations

  • RNA interference knockdown is partial and can have off-target effects.
  • Queen-like morphology is not the same as a fully functional queen.
  • Later work indicates royal jelly acts through several routes, so methylation is part of the story rather than all of it.

The experiment, explained

  • Making a queen without royal jelly

    Queen and worker have the same genome and differ only in what they were fed. Does royal jelly supply something that builds a queen, or does it change which genes get read?

What this study is used for on NatureHQ

One study can inform several subjects. Here is everywhere this one is cited.

Finding the paper

Published by: American Association for the Advancement of SciencePublished in Science or Science Advances (AAAS).

doi.org/10.1126/science.1153069

This reference was resolved automatically against Crossref on 2026-08-11.

NatureHQ summarises research in its own words and does not reproduce published text. Reviewed 2026-08-10.