March 28th:

Who-s-Who: Michaela & Kate
Food: Patrik S & Rachel

Discussion: RHEA & RYAN

Herb BR, Wolschin F, Hansen KD, Aryee MJ, Langmead B, et al. 2012. Reversible switching between epigenetic states in honeybee behavioral subcastes. Nature Neuroscience 15: 1371-73.

The Supplementary Materials are going to be very helpful on this one. There are a lot of new techniques and complicated figures. It may take some work to figure out what is being plotted in each and what the take home message is for each.

You'll want to be sure you know the life stages of a honye bee (below or see BeeSpace).

bee

There are also a lot of lectures and material about Honeybee biology and genomics. Bee Space.

It is also handy that one can experimentally manipulate the social structure of a bee hive.

figure taken from Ekonich & Roberts 2005. which is a simple review of bee biology and research. For a more extensive and recent review of genomis in these organisms see Zayed & Robinson 2012.