🔬 Science Jun 23, 2026 · Ben Sullivan

Honeybees Have a Unique Genetic Switch for Building Workers

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Inside a sealed wax cell, a pale grub is dismantling itself. Over a handful of days it will liquefy much of what it is and rebuild from the wreckage: legs, wings, the compound eyes, the brain that will one day navigate to a flower and back. Same genome at the start as at the finish, not a single letter changed. And yet what crawls out is a worker honeybee, sterile, female, ready for a life of labor it never chose.
How does identical DNA produce such wildly different bodies at different moments?

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