Biology Reference
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allatectomized bees of Joe Sullivan (discussed in Section 7.4). It is clear
that there is genetic variation for the way in which these networks are
coupled, as demonstrated by dif erences between the high- and low-
strain bees and colonies of European and Africanized bees from dif er-
ent studies. And there is still much to learn about the coupling of Vg
and JH and their ef ects on foraging.
7.5.5 Ovary Transplants
Our research has shown a signii cant association between the number
of ovarioles of workers and the age of onset of foraging and foraging
bias for nectar and pollen. Our results were derived from correlative
studies of high- and low-strain bees and wild-type bees. I wanted a
more direct test of the causal relationship of ovary size and behavior.
One idea was to be able to produce high-strain bees with fewer ovari-
oles and low-strain bees with more. We developed a diet based on
modii ed commercially available royal jelly that we used to rear work-
ers in petri dishes. h e emerging workers had a wide range of ovariole
numbers. My plan was to raise low-strain bees with big ovaries and
see whether they behaved like high-strain bees. However, this idea
was met with skepticism from my colleagues because they felt that
the dif erence in feeding could cause many dif erences among bees
that were correlated with the ovaries, so it would not be possible to
construct a causal link from ovary to behavior. I abandoned that idea
and turned to an idea posed by Gro Amdam, and together we tried
ovary transplants.
Osman Kat anoglu and my postdoctoral researcher Ying Wang be-
gan developing surgical procedures for removing ovaries from one bee
and inserting them into the abdomen of another. Wang was trained in
China both as a medical doctor and a molecular biologist. She has excel-
lent surgical skills, at least on insects. h ey successfully developed a
grat ing technique where the recipient bees survived and the extra ova-
ries lived (Figure 7.7). In fact, the ovaries that were grat ed into the
abdomen responded to queenless conditions in the same way as the resi-
dent ovaries of the bees. We tested this by placing the bees with grat ed
