Tissue-specific transcriptional patterns underlie seasonal phenotypes in honey bees (Apis mellifera)

Adaptation to new or changing environments can be facilitated by the evolution of new genes, changes in the sequence and function of existing genes, or alterations in the spatiotemporal expression patterns of sets of interacting genes. Honey bee workers exhibit a unique winter phenotype, characterized by a dramatically increased life span, physiologically distinct from both summer nurse bees engaged in brood care and summer forager bees. Winter and summer worker bees are daughters of a single reproductive queen. Therefore, these phenotypes are not due to genetic differences. We tested the hypothesis that the winter bee phenotype is generated by changes in tissue-specific transcriptomes, where gene expression patterns of winter bees resemble those of nurses in abdominal fat body tissues and of foragers in flight muscle tissues.