One of the main causes of honey bee decline is the effects of nutrition on bee development.
Their findings were published in a journal.
Humans rely on bees for pollination. honey bees are very useful for agriculture. The honey bee population has experienced dramatic declines due to multiple stressors, the most pervasive of which is limited nutrition. According to a national survey, beekeepers in the United States lost more than 40 percent of their colonies between 2015 and 2016
The study was led by a professor in the IU Bloomington College of Arts and Sciences. We need to better understand the nutrition of the honey bee.
honey bees need to collect a variety of plants and flowers in order to stay healthy. Many bees in the US don't have this diversity.
The way in which land is used in the US has changed. Crops like corn which are wind pollinated and therefore no use to bees, cover acres and acres of land. Crops that bees pollinate are grown in monoculture.
It's not healthy to only eat one thing. A broad diet will help you meet all of your nutrition needs. The same thing happens with bees.
The bees are feeding the honeybees. Their diet consists of foraged ingredients that are rich in vitamins and minerals. They will eat royal Jelly their whole lives if they are destined to be queens. After a few days, if they are a worker, their diet will shift to the two flowers.
Royal Jelly has been known to have potent antimicrobial properties due to its acidity, viscosity and presence of antimicrobial peptides. Most of the organisms exposed to royal Jelly die.
One.
According to the new study, Bombella apis is the only bug that can thrive in royal Jelly. They found that B. apis makes royal jelly more healthy by increasing the amount of acids in it.
The bees have a symbiont that can help bolster them against stress. Bee mass dropped when we limited bee nutrition during development.
When B. apis was added to the bees, they reached the same mass as the control bees. The poor diet didn't stop the microbe from making up for it. Adding B. apis to colonies could protect them from stress.
The results show that B. apis has the potential to be used as a supplement to counteract the negative influence of poor nutrition on honey bee health. Beekeepers who already supplement their colonies with B. apis may want to add a B. apis probiotic into their diet.
Newton and her colleagues have been studying bees for over six years and found that B. apis protects bees against certain infections.
We are excited to explore the other interactions that B. apis has in a colony, to better understand what it's doing in different environments and the role it plays in association with honey bee queens.
More information: Audrey J. Parish et al, Honey bee symbiont buffers larvae against nutritional stress and supplements lysine, The ISME Journal (2022). DOI: 10.1038/s41396-022-01268-x Journal information: ISME Journal
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