Besides the activation of Relish, Imd signalling also leads to activation of components of the JNK signalling pathway (Boutros et al ., 2002) , and recent evidence indicates that this pathway can provide both positive and negative feedback for the expression of the antimicrobial peptides (Wojda et al ., 2004) . Plausible orthologues for each of the major components of the JNK signalling were also identified in the honey bee genome (Fig. 2) .