Evaluating Intragenomic Conflict in Altruistic, Pheromone-Mediated Honey Bee Behaviors

The kinship theory of intragenomic conflict predicts that, because an individual's alleles differ in probabilities of being present among relatives, selection could act on them differently and facilitate parent specific gene expression (PSGE) biases over parental investment in offspring and or social interactions among offspring. The eusocial, haplodiploid honey bee (Apis mellifera) offers an excellent model for testing predictions of this theory and evaluating molecular regulators of PSGE. In this species, intragenomic conflict is thought to operate in multiple contexts due to division of labor between polyandrous queens and her facultatively sterile worker daughters. In this study, we assessed the contribution of paternal and maternal alleles to the likelihood of nurse-aged workers performing the queen retinue response through transcriptome analysis of worker brains.