Honey bees prosper with high quality, not amount, of meals in novel laboratory setup

Honey bee staff accumulate pollen and nectar from quite a lot of flowering crops to make use of as a meals supply. Honey bees usually forage from as much as 1-2 miles away from the hive, although generally they journey even additional, together with as much as 10 miles away. However, a lot of the fashionable panorama consists of agricultural fields, which limits the foraging choices for honey bees in these areas.

Furthermore, when crops decline at summer season’s finish, honey bee populations in corn-soy heavy areas expertise huge losses, posing the query of how agricultural landscapes impression the kind of meals the honey bees usher in, and if this meals then impacts the queen’s manufacturing of eggs. Adam Dolezal (IGOH), an assistant professor of entomology at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and Ashley St. Clair, a postdoctoral researcher in Dolezal’s lab, explored these questions in a brand new paper revealed in Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems.

Their examine concerned two elements. The first concerned inserting honey bee colonies throughout differing agricultural vs wildflower prairie landscapes, and measuring the species and quantity of pollen collected, in addition to the variety of eggs laid by the queen. The researchers discovered that the amount of pollen did not differ primarily based on crop vs prairie location, however that the species of pollen did, the primary distinction being that honey bees close to prairie collected extra night primrose pollen than honey bees close to crop fields.

Additionally, queens from colonies positioned nearer to prairie laid extra eggs than these close to crop fields, notably in late summer season, when crop availability decreases. St. Clair defined that this outcome did differ a bit 12 months by 12 months, as a result of discipline experiments with honey bees have so many variables to account for.

“It’s very complicated in the field to tease apart these differences. I mean, it could be corn, pesticides, the randomness in the colonies…It could be all kinds of interactions,” mentioned St. Clair. “We wanted to see if we could replicate those findings in the lab because it would mean that pollen nutrition was actually an indicator of that reduced queen egg laying we see in August, and not some other environmental factor.”

For the second a part of the examine, the researchers used small microcolony honey bee packing containers to check the query of dietary impacts on egg laying in a managed laboratory setting, the primary examine replicate a discipline experiment on this method. The cage is manufactured from two clear items that snap collectively round an injection-molded 264-well honeycomb plate for the bees to retailer meals and for the queen to put eggs in. At the underside, there is a trough that meals might be put into for employee bees to gather, however that the queen cannot entry.

The cages had been initially designed by IGB Director Gene Robinson’s (GNDP) lab, for use for automated beekeeping. However, St. Clair and Dolezal found they had been a wonderful approach to home a number of colonies collectively in a laboratory setting, with every colony holding about 60-100 honey bees.

The colonies had been fed one among three therapy diets that mimicked the dietary mixtures discovered within the discipline element of the examine: crop combination, prairie combination, or 100% night primrose, which was added to see if its dietary worth was the explanation the honey bees favored it as a pollen supply within the discipline. The researchers then counted the variety of eggs the queen of every colony had laid each day.

In line with what was discovered within the discipline, queens laid extra eggs beneath the prairie weight loss program in comparison with these beneath the crop or primrose weight loss program. The outcomes from each the sphere and lab elements of the examine counsel that honey bee colonies do higher when given a various weight loss program, as could be present in a discipline of prairie flowers, in comparison with a much less numerous weight loss program of crops.

“The results indicate that it’s the quality of the pollen that matters more than the quantity that they’re bringing in,” St. Clair mentioned. “There are specific pollens, like evening primrose, that when mixed in can be more nutritious overall. However, in the lab, primrose did not provide enough nutrition by itself to change the queen’s fecundity. So, the take home here is that the honey bees need a diverse diet.”

So, what can farmers and/or beekeepers do to assist honey bees by way of the scarcity of meals in August? The researchers defined that prairie strips, that are already being applied by farmers for different causes, include the additional benefit of serving to the honey bees.

By inserting strips of native prairie crops round water methods and farm edges, farmers scale back erosion and water loss on their farms, and in addition present an extra food source for honey bees. And with laboratory research like this, researchers can provide higher ideas on what sorts of prairie crops to supply on the strips.

“This is a new way of thinking about what we’re measuring in these colonies,” mentioned Dolezal. “Being able to see that when you have this or that on your landscape, your queens are more productive, is really valuable.”

The workforce plans to make use of the microcolony cage system for the following analysis steps, which is able to concentrate on pesticide publicity and interactions with pollen on queen fecundity. Pesticides current a big downside for bees basically, however the particular results of pesticides might be laborious to review in such variable discipline settings. Dolezal defined that this laboratory microcolony system supplies a wonderful managed setting to proceed exploring these questions sooner or later.

“There’s a lot you can do with this system, and coming from someone who has been doing work in the field, this is like magic,” Dolezal mentioned. “This laboratory system will allow us to conduct manipulative experiments and look very finely at what’s going on in the honey bee colonies.”