Abstract: 【Aim】 This study aims to understand the transcriptome characteristics of queens and drones of the Chinese honeybee, Apis cerana cerana, and enrich the transcriptome data. 【Methods】 The transcriptomes of queens and drones newly emerged and sexually matured were constructed and analyzed by RNA-seq. 【Results】 The results showed that the proportion of nucleotides with quality value larger than 20 in reads (Q20) were more than 90% and all the reads were assembled into 90 839 uniques with a mean length of 1 549 bp. Based on sequence similarity search against five public databases (NR, SwissProt, GO, COG and KEGG), a total number of 45 112 unigenes were annotated. Using these transcriptome data as the reference sequences, we found that the genes encoding cuticular proteins/apidermins, CYP and odorant binding proteins were differentially expressed between the sexually matured bees and the newly emerged bees which are related to the development of body, reproductive system and olfaction system. Meanwhile, the odorant binding protein genes were significantly differentially expressed between the sexually matured queens and drones as well as their reproductive system. 【Conclusion】 The results indicated that the expression levels of a large number of genes changed during maturing of A. cerana cerana bees. This study made an insight into the characteristics of the development in adult queen and drone, and a lot of transcript sequences with important function were acquired for future gene expression or regulation research relative to the growth, development and reproduction in A. cerana cerana.

Key words:  Apis cerana cerana, queen, drone, reproductive system, development, transcriptome