Secret of royal jelly's super-sizing effect on queen bees appears to be special protein royalactin

Wednesday, April 27, 2011 - 13:00 in Biology & Nature

(PhysOrg.com) -- In a paper published in Nature, Japanese researcher Masaki Kamakura describes a process he used to determine that the protein royalactin, is at least one of the components responsible for turning an ordinary female bee, into a queen. In a simple process of elimination experiment, Kamakura, was able to separate the different substances that comprise royal jelly, which then allowed him to feed those substances individually to a female bee to see which caused her to take on queen bee traits.

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