Scientists have decoded the DNA of the Western honeybee, a feat that researchers say could help illuminate the genetic underpinnings of social behavior. An international team of nearly 200 scientists reported today that they had identified 10,157 genes. That’s fewer than those in the genomes of the fruit fly, mosquito or silkworm, but sufficient to produce the only non-primate species that communicates through a symbolic language. The genome of Apis mellifera was published in the journal Nature, along with a series of accompanying articles in Science, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and other scholarly journals. ‘Honeybees are important models to study the regulation and evolution of life in a society, especially social behavior itself,’ said team co-leader Gene Robinson, director of the neuroscience program at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. ‘We hope to extrapolate the biology to humans,’ added Saurabh Sinha, a computer science professor at Urbana-Champaign who led one of the companion studies about genes involved in social behavior. A typical honeybee begins its career in the hive, caring for eggs and larvae. After about two or three weeks, environmental cues from the colony turn on thousands of dormant brain genes […]