Kids learn in grade school that honeybees “create” a new queen bee by feeding a larva royal jelly. A new study find that the young bee’s diet may be only part of what crowns her queen. The chemical makeup of a small “room” in the hive where she grows up also appears to play a key role.

Most honeybee larvae develop in identical six-sided chambers, or cells, inside the hive. But these common quarters aren’t quite fit for a queen. Actually, they aren’t big enough. So when a hive needs a new queen, worker bees develop some larger peanut-shaped cells. The workers then put a fertilized egg in each of these special rooms and feed it a nutritious substance commonly called royal jelly.

Boris Baer is an entomologist, or insect biologist, at the University of California, Riverside. As a home beekeeper, he’s spent years observing his own hives. Many people learn as kids that feeding a young bee royal jelly is what turns a commoner into the queen. But Baer was also curious about the queen’s growth chamber. “Could [this] cell itself contribute to queen development?” he asks.

The new study suggests it does. Physical and chemical properties of this chamber’s walls appear to tip a larva toward the throne.

An international research team, including Baer, shared this finding in the June 18 Nature.

“The discovery is very cool and thought-provoking,” says Thomas Seeley. He’s a biologist at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y., who did not take part in the new work. “To me, queen cells [growth chambers] have long seemed important,” he says. Odors from a growing queen may permeate its walls, he says. This might mark these cells as “very special spots that workers recognize and don’t accidentally damage.”

Honeybees come in three types: workers, drones and queens.

Most eggs laid in hexagonal cells develop as worker bees. All are female. Workers build and maintain the hive. They collect pollen and nectar and convert nectar to honey. They also care for larvae. Larvae in the remaining hexagonal cells develop as males, known as drones. These leave the hive and reproduce with queen bees elsewhere.

A small handful of a hive’s cells are built differently. They house future queens. Baer and his team refer to these as “royal cribs.” A subset of nurses, known as “royal nurses,” exclusively care for these future queens.

Bees spend a lot of time and energy building queen cells. “This makes little evolutionary sense,” Baer says, “if they were merely larger food containers.” And his team’s new data suggest they aren’t.

All larvae — royals and regulars — spend a few days eating and growing before worker bees seal their cell with a wax cap. Afterward, each larva will morph into a pupa. That’s the next stage in a bee’s metamorphosis toward adulthood.

Baer’s team studied two species: western honeybees (Apis mellifera) and eastern honeybees (A. cerana). First, the researchers analyzed the wax in royal cribs and worker cells. Queen-cell wax, they found, is softer and less dense than worker-cell wax. It’s also chemically different.

Royal nurses spend more time building queen cells than worker bees spend building worker cells. This surprised Baer. Bodies of royal nurses were also warmer. This slightly warms a future queen’s surroundings. It also might help soften or melt the wax, making it easier to work with, the researchers say. They didn’t test this, however.

Royal nurses also show unusual patterns of gene activity. This suggests they are specially adapted to modify the wax they make, Baer says.

The researchers then compared how a wax cap might affect a royal larva’s survival.

To test this, they conducted wax swaps. They removed newly hatched larvae from queen cells and placed them in tiny plastic queen cups. They returned the cups to the hive, where nurse bees fed these larvae royal jelly for the next four days. The researchers then replaced the bees’ old wax caps with new wax. Some came from a royal crib. Others got wax from a worker’s growth crib.

Nearly two out of every three queen larvae under the worker-cell wax died. That’s twice the death rate of larvae given new queen-cell wax. Queens reared under queen-cell wax more closely resembled those left undisturbed in their natural cells. The pupae of those left to morph under worker-cell wax turned out smaller.

“Everything was supporting the same conclusion,” Baer says. Bees do more than feed the queen: They “actively engineer them.”

Exactly how that engineering works remains unclear. Kai Wang is an apiologist, or bee scientist, in Beijing. He works at the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences and a co-author of the new study. He finds the scents inside the cells especially intriguing.

“Are [those scents] influencing the developing queen’s senses, preparing her for mating and life after emergence?” he asks. “Are some produced by the larva herself? And could the future queen be actively communicating with the workers constructing her chamber?”

The researchers hope to find out by answering: When and how does the wax affect a bee’s development? Their findings could affect more than a queen’s evolution, Baer says. “These superorganisms [beehives] mobilize specialized workers that collectively shape the next generation,” he says. “The division of labor in bees might be much more complex than we have acknowledged so far.”

biologist: A scientist involved in the study of living things.

cell: (in biology) The smallest structural and functional unit of an organism. (in structures) The term for a small chamber.

chemical: A substance formed from two or more atoms that unite (bond) in a fixed proportion and structure. For example, water is a chemical made when two hydrogen atoms bond to one oxygen atom. Its chemical formula is H₂O. Chemical also can be an adjective to describe properties of materials that are the result of various reactions between different compounds.

develop: (adj. development) (v.) To emerge or to make come into being, either naturally or through human intervention, such as by manufacturing. (in biology) To grow as an organism from conception through adulthood, often undergoing changes in chemistry, size, mental maturity or sometimes even shape.

diet: (n.) The foods and liquids ingested by an animal to provide the nutrition it needs to grow and maintain health. Sometimes this is a specific food-intake plan.

drone: (in biology) The term for a male honeybee.

egg: A reproductive cell that contains half of the genetic information necessary to form a complete organism.

engineering: The field of research that uses math and science to solve practical problems. Someone who works in this field is known as an engineer.

entomologist: A biologist who specializes in the study of insects. A paleoentomologist studies ancient insects, mainly through their fossils.

evolution: (adj. evolutionary) A process by which species undergo changes over time, usually through genetic variation and natural selection. These changes usually result in a new type of organism better suited for its environment than the earlier type. The newer type is not necessarily more “advanced,” just better adapted to the particular conditions in which it developed. Or the term can refer to changes that occur as some natural progression within the non-living world (such as computer chips evolving to smaller devices which operate at an ever faster speed).

gene: (adj. genetic) A segment of DNA that codes, or holds instructions, for a cell’s production of a protein. Offspring inherit genes from their parents. Genes influence how an organism looks and behaves.

honey: A viscous (gooey) material that honeybees store in their honeycombs. The bees make it from nectar. Foraging bees visit flowers in search of that sugary liquid. Back at the hive, honeybees will add some enzymes to the nectar, then deposit the amber colored liquid into the hive’s combs. As worker bees use their wings to fan the cells containing this liquid, the goo heats up and some of its water will evaporate to form honey.

insect: A type of arthropod that as an adult will have six segmented legs and three body parts: a head, thorax and abdomen. There are hundreds of thousands of insects, which include bees, beetles, flies and moths.

larva: (plural: larvae) An immature life stage of an insect, which often has a distinctly different form as an adult. (Sometimes used to describe such a stage in the development of fish, frogs and other animals.)

metamorphosis: A dramatic change from one stage in an animal’s life history to the next, such as the process by which a tadpole becomes a frog or the changes that transform a caterpillar into a butterfly.

morph: Short for metamorphose, it means to change or transform from one form to another (such as from a caterpillar to a butterfly) or from one shape to another. Or it can mean to evolve or mutate, where one or more parts of the genome undergo some sort of change in their chemistry — and potentially in their function.

nectar: A sugary fluid secreted by plants, especially by flowers. It encourages pollination by insects and other animals. It is collected by bees to make into honey.

nurse: (in biology) A term for individuals that care for others, especially the young, within their community.

physical: (adj.) A term for things that exist in the real world, as opposed to in memories or the imagination. It can also refer to properties of materials that are due to their size and non-chemical interactions (such as when one block slams with force into another).

pollen: Powdery grains released by the male parts of flowers that can fertilize the female tissue to make a seed. Pollinating insects, such as bees, often pick up pollen that will later be eaten.

pupa: (plural: pupae) The life stage in insects following the larval (caterpillar) stage and preceding adulthood.

species: A group of similar organisms capable of producing offspring that can survive and reproduce.