Group size influences maternal provisioning and compensatory larval growth in honeybees

Summary: Environmental variation selects for the adaptive plasticity of maternal provisioning. Even though developing honeybees find themselves in a protected colony environment, their reproductively specialized queens actively adjust their maternal investment, even among worker-destined eggs. However, the potentially adaptive consequences of this flexible provisioning strategy and their mechanistic basis are unknown. Under natural conditions, we find that the body size of larvae hatching from small eggs in large colonies converges with that of initially larger larvae hatching from large eggs typically produced in small colonies. However, large eggs confer a persistent body size advantage when small and large eggs are cross-fostered in small and large colonies, respectively. We substantiate the increased maternal investment by identifying growth-promoting metabolomes and proteomes in large eggs compared to small eggs, which are primarily enriched in amino acid metabolism and cell maturation. Thus, our study provides a comprehensive adaptive explanation for the worker egg size plasticity of honeybees.