As Dr Ryszard Maleszka likes to say, honey bee queens are made, not born. When a new queen is needed by a colony, a chosen larva will be fed exclusively on a diet of royal jelly, the magnificently rich substance produced by glands in the heads of nurse bees, young workers who never made the cut themselves.

Quite why the workers choose a particular larva is impossible to ascertain, but once she is chosen, that larva will go on to a life radically different to her sisters, all of whom are clonally identical. She literally swims in a sea of royal jelly, Maleszka says, while her siblings are given a brief taste upon birth to get them started in life but then are fed with a normal mixture of pollen and nectar.

Not only is she larger than her sisters and is the only one able to reproduce, but the queen can live up to three years while the workers fade out after just over a month. She keeps sperm from one or many mates in her spermatheca, a storage organ, and chooses when to fertilise and not to fertilise her eggs, the minority unfertilised eggs going on to hatch as males. It is a lifecycle that has fascinated people for generations, and with the sequencing of the honey bee genome in 2006, there has been an explosion in understanding of the bee, an insect essential for the functioning of nature as we know it.

Before the honey bee genome was sequenced, the insect models available for genomic studies consisted of the old favourite, Drosophila melanogaster, and the malaria mosquito, Anopheles gambiae. There are now 21 insect species sequenced and two other arthropods, although 12 of the insects are Drosophila relatives, carried out for an evolutionary comparison of one of biology’s most studied organisms. The other nine represent both social and solitary species and different orders.

“The honey bee has been done in the proper way – we wanted to sequence the genome but to get as much biological information as possible,” Maleszka says. “From the moment of publication, which isn’t even two years ago now, there have been over 65 papers published on the bee genome and many of them are in high impact journals.”

One of the most important findings from the project is the existence in the honey bee of a full complement of genes for DNA methyltransferases, the enzymes that set in motion epigenetic changes in organisms. Epigenetics is now an enormously interesting field of study, highlighting that while nature provides the code, nurture is of the upmost importance.

Maleszka, from the Molecular Genetics and Evolution group in the Research School of Biological Sciences at the Australian National University, will address the ComBio conference on the subject of insect genomes and the genomic revolution. In particular, he will stress that in order to bridge the gap between genotype and phenotype, studying genetic and epigenetic systems on a global scale – and how the environment modulates and controls those systems – is essential.