Preventing young bees from developing aversive memories against the queen's odours ensures that young bees continue to tend to the queen - thus safeguarding the future of the queen and, ultimately, the colony.

'Evolution has provided queen bees with a chemical that selectively blocks aversive learning but leaves reward learning intact,' said Mercer. 'Two years ago we identified which chemical was responsible for these effects, and now we have discovered how the chemical works.'

Establishing a link between changes at the behavioural level and events at a cellular and molecular level is generally very difficult because the processes underlying events such as learning and memory are complex.

These findings were published in Current Biology.