They have a complex social life, highly sophisticated ways of communicating and a remarkable memory. No mean feat when you consider that a honeybee’s brain is 100,000 times as small as ours. They even operate a caste system with division of labour. A better understanding of how the honeybee does all this should come with the sequencing of its genome – all 1.8 billion base pairs of it.
The honeybee (Apis mellifera) is the third insect, after the fruit fly and mosquito, to get its genome sequenced, and a comparison with those insects has already thrown up surprises (Nature,…
