Worker sterility is a defining characteristic of social insects. Studies into a mutant ‘anarchistic’ strain of honey bee (in which the normally sterile workers activate their ovaries and lay eggs) identified a short list of candidate genes for worker sterility. Interestingly, these genes are implicated in the mTOR signalling pathway which controls cell growth and proliferation. The mTOR pathway is both pro-apoptotic and anti-apoptotic, prompting us to investigate the role of apoptosis in worker ovary plasticity. By quantifying the expression of the genes of interest in the ovaries of workers with non-activated and activated ovaries we found Anarchy (GB13621), a peroxisomal membrane protein, predicted the ovary state of workers with close to 90% accuracy. Anarchy suppresses the activation of the worker’s ovary by responding directly to the presence of the queen and is specific to the regulation of reproductive state in the worker caste as we found no differential expression in queens. Using RNA interference, we knocked down the expression of Anarchy in wildtype workers and found evidence that it interacts with a key gene in the apoptosis regulatory pathway.