Along with PGRP-LC and SR-C , two other receptors were recently found to participate in the phagocytosis of infectious non-self in Drosophila , DSCAM and Eater. DSCAM, long implicated in neuronal development, was shown to have a likely role in the binding of bacteria by Drosophila haemocytes (Watson et al ., 2005) . This gene, which has > 12 000 potential splice variants in honey bees thanks to three sets of highly interchangeable exons (Graveley et al ., 2004) , is a very interesting candidate for determining the extent to which bees might better tune their immune response to specific pathogens. Another Table 1 . Gene counts for a subset of gene families implicated in insect immunity. Anopheles gambiae and Drosophila melanogaster counts based on Christophides et al. (2002 Christophides et al. ( , 2004 recently identified protein involved in Drosophila cellular immunity is Eater, a phagocytic receptor characterized by several repeats of an EGF motif in its extracellular domain (Kocks et al., 2005) . Many genes with EGF motifs are present in the bee genome (e.g. GB14654, Supplementary Material Table S1 ), as in flies, although their orthology with Eater is unclear. Bees are also likely to engage in the encapsulation of endoparasites and pathogens, and show typical integrins (Honey Bee Genome Sequencing Consortium, 2006) implicated in lamellocyte encapsulation . None of these cellular immunity components appear to be more diverse in bees than in fly species (Supplementary Material Table S1 ).