Genetics of aggression in honey bees

A study suggests that aggressive behavior in honey bees depends on the genetic makeup of the colony as a whole. As social animals, honey bees are influenced by the colony social environment, including hive defense. Gene Robinson, Guojie Zhang, Matthew Hudson, and colleagues conducted a genome-wide association study of nine colonies of gentle Africanized honey bees (gAHBs) from Puerto Rico, which recently evolved to be less aggressive than other Africanized honey bee (AHB) populations. The authors did not observe significant associations between individual genotype and aggressive individual behavior. However, the authors found more than 1,100 genetic variants with colony-wide frequencies that were significantly associated with colony aggression levels in response to a simulated attack. The link was particularly strong for a region of chromosome 7 that contains several genes, including a gene homologous to the dpr4 gene in fruit flies, which is involved in brain development. The chromosomal region exhibited a strong signature of selection for the evolution of gAHBs from AHBs, providing molecular evidence for the long-held idea that selection for aggression in bees occurs at the colony level. According to the authors, the findings suggest a novel approach to uncovering links between genetics and behavior for traits influenced by the social environment.

Article #19-22927: "Genomic regions influencing aggressive behavior in honey bees are defined by colony allele frequencies," by Arián Avalosa et al.

MEDIA CONTACT: Gene E. Robinson, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, IL; tel: 217-265-0309; e-mail: <generobi@illinois.edu>; Guojie Zhang, China National GeneBank, Shenzhen, CHINA; e-mail: <zhanggj@genomics.cn>; Matthew E. Hudson, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, IL; tel: 217-244-8096; e-mail: mhudson@illinois.edu

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