Nutritional Control of Reproductive Status in Honeybees via

Fertile queens and sterile workers are alternative forms of the adult female honeybee that develop from genetically identical larvae following differential feeding with royal jelly. We show that silencing the expression of DNA methyltransferase Dnmt3, a key driver of epigenetic global reprogramming, in newly hatched larvae led to a royal jelly–like effect on the larval developmental trajectory; the majority of Dnmt3 small interfering RNA–treated individuals emerged as queens with fully developed ovaries. Our results suggest that DNA methylation in Apis is used for storing epigenetic information, that the use of that information can be differentially altered by nutritional input, and that the flexibility of epigenetic modifications underpins, profound shifts in developmental fates, with massive implications for reproductive and behavioral status. Manyorganisms respond to environmen-tal conditions by displaying phenotyp-ic plasticity, that is, producing different phenotypes from the same DNA genome (1, 2). In social insects, the production of contrasting adult morphologies as well as different repro-ductive and behavioral systems is critical to their social organization and division of labor (3–6)