Understanding fertility control in worker bees has long proved challenging to scientists, including pioneering English biologist Charles Darwin.
People had worked on this problem for "a long time", Otago biochemist Prof Peter Dearden said.
And he was "really delighted" he and two colleagues, Dr Elizabeth Duncan and Dr Otto Hyink, had "managed to achieve something pretty cool" after seven years of work.
It had long been known that worker bees had a very limited ability to reproduce in a hive with a queen and brood present.
However, in their absence a third of the worker bees activated their ovaries and laid eggs that hatched into fertile male drones.
It was queen pheromone that repressed worker bee fertility, but how it achieved this had remained unclear.
The Otago researchers had used Alzheimer’s drugs and powerful genomic analysis to discover that an ancient cell-signalling pathway, called Notch, had been co-opted to constrain reproduction in worker bees.
This pathway also plays a major role in regulating embryonic development in all animals, including humans.
And this research could help shed more light on aspects of the Notch pathway’s role in early neural development in humans, he said.
In research just published in the prestigious journal Nature Communications, Prof Dearden and colleagues demonstrated that chemically inhibiting Notch signalling could overcome the effect of queen mandibular pheromone (QMP) and promote ovary activity in adult worker bees.
He had been surprised to find that Notch signalling acted on the earliest stages of egg development in the ovary, and that in the absence of QMP, the Notch receptor in a key region of worker bee ovaries became degraded.
Notch signalling’s fundamental role in the ovary had been transformed in honeybees into social control of worker bees’ reproduction, he said.