Rob Page

How does complex social behavior evolve?   What are the developmental building blocks of division of labor and specialization, the hallmarks of insect societies?   Recent behavioral, genetic, and genomic studies have revealed the developmental origins in the evolution of division of labor and specialization in foraging worker honey bees, the hallmarks of complex insect societies. Selective breeding for a single social trait, the amount of surplus pollen stored in the nest (pollen hoarding) revealed a phenotypic architecture of correlated traits at multiple levels of biological organization in facultatively-sterile female worker honey bees.   Genetic mapping has demonstrated that the phenotypic architecture is a consequence of a genetic architecture rich in pleiotropy and epistasis possibly affecting a reproductive signaling pathway.   Gene knockdown studies and transplantation of ovaries provides strong support for the hypothesis that division of labor and foraging specialization are derived from the reproductive cycle of solitary insects and under the control of the ovaries. Ovary development in worker honey bees is under the control of a social genome that results in the joint developmental control of the immature worker larva and its nestmates that feed it.