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In the news: Earning a bee’s wings

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Graduate student Cassondra Vernier conducted lab experiments and observed hours of bee interactions at the entrance to the hive. She is shown here at Tyson Research Center, Washington University’s environmental field station.

“It was always assumed that the way that honey bees acquire nestmate recognition cues, their cuticular hydrocarbon (CHC) profiles, is through these mechanisms where they rub up against each other, or transfer compounds between each other,” said Cassondra L. Vernier, a graduate student at Washington University and first author of the new study.

“You would expect, then, that even younger bees would have a very similar pheromonal profile as older bees. When in fact that is not what we saw,” she said.

Vernier compared the CHC profiles of bees on the day they were born and at 1 week, 2 weeks, and 3 weeks old. The 3-week-old bees had significantly different profiles than their younger siblings.

-by Talia Ogliore, full story here