The Gene Gamble

When researching the infinite complexity of divine Mother Nature, after the human race, the honeybee is the most studied creature on Earth. As recently as the last two decades, science has uncovered some exquisite truths about both species; not the least of which is the barriers which separate us are thinner than we like to believe.

The Bee Genome
In 2002, in support of the ongoing struggle to better understand the complexities that surround human health, an international consortium of scientists and universities decided to sequence the honeybee’s DNA. Called the Bee Genome Project (BGP) over 170 investigators representing 100 groups from 16 countries were involved in an attempt to gain insights into human disease like allergies, immune deficiencies, antibiotic resistance and genetic disease. Assigned to the public realm and funded by the National Human Genome Research Institute of the National Institutes of Health and the US Department of Agricultural, by 2006 the four-year project was complete.

Honeybees captured scientific musings because their social behaviour is so closely related to our own. Like humans, honeybees exist in a complex social community. From infant to worker to queen, every honeybee has a job. While the queen lays her eggs 24-7, adolescent honeybees clean the colony’s homestead. Older more experienced honeybees repair the nest and forage for food. Nurses tend the brood. Undertakers remove the dead and the honeybee police keep law and order. It's this advanced ability to self-organize into productive societies that made honeybees such ideal candidates for scientific study.

The gene mapping project revealed the honeybee genome consists of 10,000 genes with approximately 236 million base pairs. By comparison, the human genome has roughly 30,000 genes with approximately 2.9 billion base-pair. The hypothesis goes humans and honeybees are genetically connected sharing a common ancestor. Estimated to have lived 600 million years ago, our primordial sludge evolved into the fish family and moved onto land. Honeybee sludge evolved from crustacean-like ocean dwellers to flying insects.

Apis melliferaThe Flying Sisterhood
During their 100 million year stay on Earth, they started out on the great evolutionary highway as a predatory wasp living alone in a nest in the ground. The vast majority of the other 20,000 bee species still live that way. But as the genus Apis moved through time, honeybees transformed themselves into one of the most advanced species living on Earth today.

In order to make such a complex transformation, every system of the honeybee’s body required alteration including their ability to assess and change patterns of behaviour when in evolutionary peril. This means honeybees not only needed to invent new functions, but they also needed to refine the old ones to fit new purpose. In part, it’s this flexibility that makes them so highly adaptive. They are one of the few species that survived the great Cretaceous-Tertiary event which occurred over 65 million years ago. Known as the K-T extinction, this large scale mass extinction wiped out the dinosaurs. But the intrepid flying sisterhood just kept on making the necessary adjustments whenever an environmental hardball headed their way.

Aside from the discovery that honeybees perfected their existence by riding in and out of the ages with wisdom on their wing -- the BGP also put an end to an age old argument. Size really doesn’t matter; it is what you do with it that counts. A honeybees’ sophisticated behaviour is governed by less than one million neurons contained in brain tissue that is smaller than a single cubic millimetre. That’s a neural density 10 times higher than our own cerebral cortex. Honeybee neurons are so advanced we have neither the skill nor the imagination to understand how they are interconnected.

The BGP pinned down some interesting gene and cell functionality which honeybees share with humans. For example, we share the same AT Rich ARID3B family of genes. A gene family refers to any similarity between characteristics or traits. The ARID gene family plays an important role in embryonic development. Think of a honeybee’s black and yellow stripped jacket. These genes are responsible for a range of cellular functions that helps to characterize the sentient being we are about to become. Acting like pieces of an intricate jigsaw puzzle, they establish groups of cells in the proper relationship to each other during embryonic growth. Honeybees also use the same family of genes as humans to sense time. But theirs are considerably powered up. Honeybee circadian rhythm doesn’t need to rely on light or the position of the sun to follow the day’s 24-hour cycle. Their genes sense time in total darkness and in different time zones.

During the mapping of the bee genome,it was discovered honeybees have smaller sized gene families. Basically, honeybees have evolved to do more with less. Microbiologists believe small gene families reflect a selective elimination of genes whose functions became expendable once specialized lifestyle choices are set in evolutionary stone.

For example, scent is essential to honeybee survival. Pheromones play a central role not only when honeybees forage for food but their keen sense of smell directs them quickly to their place within a very large and complex social order. Micro biologists tallied 170 olfactory genes, compared to the multigene family consisting of over 900 genes in humans. Even royal jelly, a unique genetic feature of honeybees, requires only ten gene traits to produce. Manufactured from the honeybee’s top chakra, the royal jelly is specifically formulated to only serve the nutritional needs of the next queen.

Scientists were also interested to learn we share particular support systems that control genes. Unlike other insects, the honeybee has a vertebrate-like set of enzymes which methylate or modify genes. In both honeybees and humans, these cells cap certain genes with clusters of atoms called methyl groups which switch genes on or off. This implies that methylation plays an important role in silencing genes whether in honeybees or other vertebrates like humans.