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About Honeybee:
The European honeybee Apis mellifera mellifera belongs to the order Hymenoptera, an insect order that includes bees, wasps, ants and sawflies. Recent molecular phylogenies have placed the Hymenoptera at the base of the holometabolous insects, or those insects that go through a complete metamorphosis. The honeybee is unique in its long history of domestication by humans and its agricultural importance. Honeybees, like many Hymenopterans, are social insects: they live in large hives each of which contains a single fertile queen, a seasonally variable number of sterile female workers (potentially thousands), and at most a few hundred male drones. A queen can lay up to 1,500 eggs during the course of a single day, and may live several years. This social structure, and the stereotypical and reproducible behavior patterns of the hive members, make the honeybee of particular importance to researchers interested in understanding the genetic basis for behavior and socioevolution.
Honeybees are an amenable research organism. The recent sequencing of the honeybee genome, as well as a substantial EST collection, has allowed for rapid gene discovery and cloning. Honeybees can be raised in the lab even in an urban environment, and large quantities of embryos collected from approximately April to November, depending on the local weather. It has been possible to adapt a number of fruit fly protocols to honeybee embryos and tissues: honeybee embryos can be harvested, fixed by several different methods, and stained for RNA and protein expression.
Aside from their social organization and behavior, bees are of interest for a number of developmental and physiological reasons. Like the fruit fly Drosophila, the standard insect model organism, honeybees undergo extreme long germ band development, meaning that all body segments are specified simultaneously during embryogenesis. They also undergo a different form of gastrulation than Drosophila, wherein instead of the mesoderm invaginating, the ectoderm moves down over the mesoderm. This, coupled with their estimated 300 million years divergence from the fruit fly, makes them an attractive system for studying the evolution of development and developmental gene networks. Honeybees also have fascinating system of haplo-diploid sex determination (the males are haploid, the females are diploid), an expanded family of odorant receptors, and a divergent innate immune system. In sum, the study of the honeybee Apis mellifera has the potential to inform such areas as behavioral genetics, the evolution of development and eusociality, innate immunity, sex determination, physiology and undoubtedly many other areas as well.  A. mellifera embryo in situ stained for the gene SoxNeuro |
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