#Substances in honey increase honey bee detox gene expressionresearch in the wake of Colony Collapse Disorder a mysterious malady afflicting (primarily commercial) honey bees suggests that pests pathogens
New research indicates that the honey bee diet influences the bees'ability to withstand at least some of these assaults.
Some components of the nectar and pollen grains bees collect to manufacture food to support the hive increase the expression of detoxification genes that help keep honey bees healthy.
However honey bees have relatively few genes dedicated to this detoxification process compared to other insect species she said.
Bees feed on hundreds of different types of nectar and pollen and are exposed potentially to thousands of different types of phytochemicals yet they only have one-third to one-half the inventory of enzymes that break down these toxins compared to other species Berenbaum said.
Determining which of the 46 P450 genes in the honey bee genome are used to metabolize constituents of their natural diet and
Every frame of honey (in the honey bee hive) is phytochemically different from the next frame of honey
because different nectars went in to make the honey. If you don't know what your next meal is going to be how does your detoxification system know which enzymes to upregulate?
Research had shown previously that eating honey turns on detoxification genes that metabolize the chemicals in honey
To do this they fed bees a mixture of sucrose and powdered sugar called bee candy
We found that the perfect signal p-coumaric acid is in everything that bees eat--it's the monomer that goes into the macromolecule called sporopollenin
This signal can also turn on honey bee immunity genes that code for antimicrobial proteins. According to Berenbaum three other honey constituents were effective inducers of these detoxification enzymes.
These components probably originate in the tree resins that bees use to make propolis the bee glue
which lines all of the cells and seals cracks within a hive. Propolis turns on immunity genes--it's not just an antimicrobial caulk or glue.
Many commercial beekeepers use honey substitutes such as high-fructose corn syrup or sugar water to feed their colonies.
Berenbaum believes the new research shows that honey is a rich source of biologically active materials that truly matter to a bee.
so beekeepers can enhance their bees'ability to withstand pathogens and pesticides. Although she doesn't recommend that beekeepers rush out
and dump p-coumaric acid into their high fructose corn syrup she hopes that her team's research can be used as the basis of future work aimed at improving bee health.
If I were a beekeeper I would at least try to give them some honey year-round Berenbaum said
because if you look at the evolutionary history of Apis mellifera this species did not evolve with high fructose corn syrup.
It is clear that honey bees are adapted highly to consuming honey as part of their diet.
Story Source: The above story is provided based on materials by University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
For example increases in parasitism and disease in honeybees can be linked to selection by beekeepers for reduced resin deposition by their bees.
A reintroduction of such behavior in managed bee colonies would likely have great benefits for disease management the authors say.
#Let me introduce myself--leafcutter bee Megachile chomskyi from Texasthe Genus megachile is a cosmopolitan group of solitary bees often called leafcutter bees.
This is one of the largest genera of bees with well over 1500 species in over 50 subgenera.
What is specific and interesting about this bee is the fact that it is among those insects
and the Zoological Society of London (ZSL) have discovered why bees copy each other when looking for nectar
Despite their tiny brains bees are smart enough to pick out the most attractive flowers by watching other bees and learning from their behaviour.
Learning where to find nectar by watching others seems fantastically complex for a tiny bee
Bees were trained to know that sugar could be found on flowers where other foragers were present.
The bees then watched through a screen as their companions chose a particular flower colour
When later allowed to choose a flower colour alone the test bees copied their companions'choices.
Naive foragers who had learnt never to equate other bees with nectar did not copy other bees'behaviour.
Our study shows how bees use past associations to make decisions about when to copy others
This suggests that other species not just bees may also use this logical process when learning from others.
We suggest that bees are using similar logic to a person who might get a headache
The scientists also found that bees consider whether their companions are making good choices. In laboratory flight arenas test bees did not copy other bees
if they knew that those bees were visiting bitter-tasting flowers. Instead the test bees actively avoided the flower colours that other bees chose.
The flowers were made bitter using quinine--a flavour used in tonic water which bees typically dislike.
Story Source: The above story is provided based on materials by Queen Mary University of London. Note:
Materials may be edited for content and length. Journal Reference e
#Hepatitis a virus discovered to cloak itself in membranes hijacked from infected cellsviruses have historically been classified into one of two types--those with an outer lipid-containing envelope and those without an envelope.
This included monitoring whether the bee moved from a contaminated to a noncontaminated flower whether the bee moved to the same group it had sampled just or whether the bee left the flower group without visiting other individual blooms.
Following each observed visit all flowers in the array were replaced with new flowers to ensure accurate results.
We found that the bees still visited those flowers contaminated by metal indicating that they can't detect metal from afar said Ashman.
In the study the bees were able to taste discriminate against and leave flowers containing nickel.
However this was not the case for the aluminum-treated flowers as the bees foraged on the contaminated flowers for time periods equal to those of the noncontaminated flowers.
It's unclear why the bees didn't sense the aluminum said Meindl. However past studies show that the concentrations of aluminum found throughout blooms tend to be higher than concentrations of nickel.
This suggests that the bees may be more tolerant or immune to its presence. These results also have implications for environmentally friendly efforts to decontaminate soil in particular a method called phytoremediation--a promising approach that involves growing metal-accumulating plants on polluted soil to remove such contaminates.
because the bees observed in the study foraged on metal-rich flowers. She states that further research is needed to identify plants that are ecologically safe
The bees were observed at a nature reserve in Western Pennsylvania during August and September 2012.
#Pesticide combination affects bees ability to learntwo new studies have highlighted a negative impact on bees'ability to learn following exposure to a combination of pesticides commonly used in agriculture.
The researchers found that the pesticides used in the research at levels shown to occur in the wild could interfere with the learning circuits in the bee's brain.
They also found that bees exposed to combined pesticides were slower to learn or completely forgot important associations between floral scent and food rewards.
and his team investigated the impact on bees'brains of two common pesticides: pesticides used on crops called neonicotinoid pesticides
and another type of pesticide coumaphos that is used in honeybee hives to kill the Varroa mite a parasitic mite that attacks the honey bee.
The intact bees'brains were exposed to pesticides in the lab at levels predicted to occur following exposure in the wild
They found that both types of pesticide target the same area of the bee brain involved in learning causing a loss of function.
and Dr Sally Williamson at Newcastle University who found that combinations of these same pesticides affected learning and memory in bees.
when bees had been exposed to combinations of these pesticides for 4 days as many as 30%of honeybees failed to learn
because bees that cannot learn will not be able to find food. Together the researchers expressed concerns about the use of pesticides that target the same area of the brain of insects and the potential risk of toxicity to non-target insects.
However little consideration has been given to the miticidal pesticides introduced directly into honeybee hives to protect the bees from the Varroa mite.
#Social bees mark dangerous flowers with chemical signalsscientists already knew that some social bee species warn their conspecifics
whether bees are capable of using evasive chemical signals to mark those flowers where they have previously been attacked.
and observed whether the bees advised the rest of their conspecifics of the danger of gathering nectar at a certain plant.
and until now we were not sure of the role that these pheromones played in social bees.
Our results indicate that unlike solitary bees social bees use this type of alert system on flowers to warn their conspecifics of the presence of a nearby predator as explained by Ana L. Llandres from the University of Tours
In order to determine whether social and solitary bees responded to these olfactory alarm signals an experiment was performed using individuals from both types and from different countries:
In some plants the predator attack was simulated by trapping the bees with pincers whereas in other cases control plants were used in
Solitary bees responded similarly in the case of flowers that had been attacked by control predators and control flowers.
However social bees responded very differently explains L. Llandres. Despite approaching both types of flower the probability of landing on control flowers was much higher.
The scientists also detected that the probability of social bees rejecting flowers was much greater
This study supports the idea that the sociability of bees is linked to the evolution of warning signals.
and communicate like bees, researcher saysthe immune system's T cells while coordinating responses to diseases and vaccines act like honey bees sharing information about the best honey sources according to a new study by scientists at UC
San francisco. In the morning each bee goes looking individually for a sugar source then comes back to the hive
and does a dance in front of the other bees describing the location of what it's found which helps the hive decide collectively where the best source is said senior scientist Matthew Krummel Phd a UCSF professor of pathology.
They don't bust the same moves as bees but T cells gather together and communicate essential information to each other in a similar way Krummel said thereby helping to coordinate immune responses directed against invading pathogens.
This discovery might lead to useful therapeutic interventions to fight disease according to Krummel. Results of the study were published online March 10 in Nature Immunology.
#Bees get a buzz from flower nectar containing caffeineyou may need a cup of coffee to kick start the day
and could help the plant recruit more bees to spread its pollen. In tests honeybees feeding on a sugar solution containing caffeine
Remembering floral traits is difficult for bees to perform at a fast pace as they fly from flower to flower
and we have found that caffeine helps the bee remember where the flowers are. In turn bees that have fed on caffeine-laced nectar are laden with coffee pollen
and these bees search for other coffee plants to find more nectar leading to better pollination.
So caffeine in nectar is likely to improve the bee's foraging prowess while providing the plant with a more faithful pollinator.
In the study researchers found that the nectar of Citrus and Coffea species often contained low doses of caffeine.
and tastes bitter to many insects including bees so we were surprised to find it in the nectar.
However it occurs at a dose that's too low for the bees to taste
but high enough to affect bee behaviour. The effect of caffeine on the bees'long-term memory was profound with three times as many bees remembering the floral scent 24 hours later
and twice as many bees remembering the scent after three days. Typically the nectar in the flower of a coffee plant contains almost as much caffeine as a cup of instant coffee.
Just as black coffee has a strong bitter taste to us high concentrations of caffeine are repellent to honeybees.
What we see in bees could explain why people prefer to drink coffee when studying.
and genes human and bee brains function very similarly. Thus we can use the honeybee to investigate how caffeine affects our own brains and behaviours.
Population declines among bees have serious consequences for natural ecosystems and agriculture since bees are essential pollinators for many crops
and wild flowering species. If declines are allowed to continue there is a risk to our natural biodiversity and on some crop production.
Professor Stevenson said Understanding how bees choose to forage and return to some flowers over others will help inform how landscapes could be managed better.
#New research confirms plight of bumble bees, persistence of other bees in Northeasta new study shows that
although certain bumble bees are at risk other bee species in the northeastern United states persisted across a 140-year period despite expanding human populations and changing land use.
Led by Rutgers University and based extensively on historical specimens from the American Museum of Natural history and nine other bee collections the study informs conservation efforts aimed at protecting native bee species
and the important pollinator services they provide. The results are published today in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Bees are considered the most important pollinators because of their efficiency specificity and ubiquity. However despite concerns about pollinator declines long-term data on the status of bee species are scarce.
In the new study the researchers used new web-based software to compile 30000 museum specimen records representing 438 bee species. A novel aspect of this study was the use of collaborative
online tools that allowed data to be captured quickly and accurately across 10 institutions many of which lacked preexisting capabilities in this area said John Ascher a research scientist in the Museum's Division of Invertebrate Zoology
From the years 1872 to 2011 the authors observed slight declines in the number of bee species in comparable samples from the northeastern United states. Statistical analysis revealed that only three species exhibited a rapid and recent population
collapse--all species of bumble bees which also have been shown to be declining in previous studies.
Other species including the oil bee Macropis patellata showed more gradual declines. Although few species were found to have declined severely more than half of all bee species changed in proportion over time with 29 percent of the species decreasing and 27 percent increasing.
Bees that showed the greatest increase are mostly exotic species that were introduced to North america. Few such species were present in the earliest historical samples
but they make up an ever-increasing proportion of more recent samples. Environmental change affects species differentially creating'losers'that decline with increased human activity
The scientists found that declining bee species tend to have larger body sizes restricted diets and shorter flight seasons.
They also revealed that southern bees reaching their northern distributional limits in the Northeast are increasing a finding that could reflect a response to climate change.
The average April temperature increased by more than one degree during the last 40 years in the study region causing bees
Ongoing data capture will continue to expand the bee database so that statistical analyses can be applied across a broader geographic area
mysterious disease syndrome as key factors in bee colony deathsa new long-term study of honey bee health has found that a little-understood disease study authors are calling idiopathic
which kills off bee larvae is the largest risk factor for predicting the death of a bee colony.
The study evaluated the health of 80 commercial colonies of honey bees (Apis mellifera) in the eastern United states on an almost monthly basis over the course of 10 months
--which is a full working season for commercial bee colonies. The goal of the study was to track changes in bee colony health
and for those colonies that died off to determine what factors earlier in the year may have contributed to colony death.
Honey bee colonies have only one queen. When a colony perceives something wrong with its queen the workers eliminate that queen
The occurrence of a queen event had a risk factor of 3. 1. This is the first time anyone has done an epidemiological study to repeatedly evaluate the health of the same commercial honey bee colonies over the course of a season Tarpy says.
The paper Idiopathic brood disease syndrome and queen events as precursors of colony mortality in migratory beekeeping operations in the eastern United states is published in the February issue of Preventive Veterinary medicine.
Half the bee species associated with these flowers in Robertson's lifetime had disappeared some pollinators were active before their plants had bloomed plants weren't visited as often
and the bees that did visit weren't carrying as much usable pollen. The network is still there
The bees still have food plants are still getting pollinator service. But the service has declined the network's structure is weaker
and butterflies as well as bees) to 456 plant species. He identified and described several hundred insects previously unknown to science.
which were associated with 109 bees in Robertson's time. If any community is going to be affected by climate change Knight said it would be this one because the plants flower soon after the winter snow melts.
In many ways the most startling finding to emerge from the re-collection was that half Robertson's bees were nowhere to be found.
Robertson's bees were mostly solitary bees small nondescript bees that lay a few eggs in cells
Some of these bees have broad distributions encompassing for example the entire eastern United states so even though they're locally extirpated most are said not extinct Knight.
The re-collection also revealed timing mismatches between the bees and the plants. Plants were flowering earlier than they had in Robertson's time:
Bees were active earlier too: on average 11 days earlier. But despite similar average shifts timing mismatches occurred
because the early-season bees advanced a lot more than the late-season bees said Knight and no such pattern occurred among the plants.
Of the 532 pairings between the plants and bees that linked the subset of Robertson's network Knight
because bee species were missing and the rest had broken for other reasons including timing mismatches or habitat fragmentation.
All the network diagrams say is the bee is present the plant is present and we saw them interacting at least once Knight points out.
All through high school I studied bees and ants he said and when I came to college the Illinois Natural history Survey hired
In my senior year I was asked to collect bees at Carlinville to try to duplicate as much as possible Robertson's efforts.
because it is the plant in the network currently visited by the greatest diversity of bees Knight said.
Comparing the visitation rates we measured to Marlin's we discovered that the bees were making fewer trips to the flowers than they had in the 1970s.
Marlin counted 0. 59 bee arrivals per minute and we counted 0. 14 arrivals. So even those some interactions are still present they're weaker.
Both Robertson and Marlin had collected their bees pinned them and deposited them in the Illinois Natural history Survey often still fuzzy with pollen.
To assess how much usable pollen the bees had carried Burkle and Knight picked six bee species that frequently visited Claytonia virginica two named by Robertson and washed Robertson's archival specimens of those bees Marlin's specimens and their own.
We gave the bee a gentle bath and washed its pollen off onto a microscope slide
and then we fluffed it back up with a hair dryer Knight says. Since these were all the same species of bee caught off the same flower the default assumption was that they'd be covered in much the same pollen.
Not so. It turned out that these bees had been more loyal to Claytonia in the past than they were now.
The fraction of the pollen on the bee contributed by Claytonia virginica was highest in Robertson's time lower in Marlin's time and much lower in 2010.
Since pollen from another species of plant is at best unusable and at worst can clog up pistils preventing fertilization the bee washings also pointed to a decline in pollination services.
The bottom linei was surprised by how tenuous a lot of these plant-bee interactions are said Burkle. We've pushed on these communities a lot
and they are pretty robust but at the same time they are compromised and more compromised than I was expecting them to be.
#Loss of wild insects hurts crops around the worldresearchers studying data from 600 fields in 20 countries have found that managed honey bees are not as successful at pollinating crops as wild insects primarily wild bees suggesting the continuing
We also show that adding more honey bees often does not fix this problem but that increased service by wild insects would help.
These pollinators including bees flies butterflies and beetles usually live in natural or semi-natural habitats such as the edges of forests hedgerows or grasslands.
The study suggests that new practices for integrated management of both honey bees and wild insects will enhance global yields of animal-pollinated crops
Longstanding analyses based on the fossil record holds ants and wasps in a clade known as Vespoidea with bees as a sister group.
The team reassess the relationships between the subfamilies of bees wasps and ants and suggest that wasps are part of a separate clade from ants
and bees though further genome sequences and comparative data will help to resolve this controversy The dataset offers a first chance to analyse subfamily relationships across large numbers of genes
'This finding would have important general implications for our understanding of eusociality as it would suggest that bees
and that bees are lost wasps that predacious behaviours.''Their work suggests that novel genes play a much more important role in social behaviour than we previously thought.
On their side bees acquire a positive charge as they fly through the air. No spark is produced as a charged bee approaches a charged flower
but a small electric force builds up that can potentially convey information. By placing electrodes in the stems of petunias the researchers showed that
when a bee lands the flower's potential changes and remains so for several minutes.
which flowers tell bees another bee has recently been visiting? To their surprise the researchers discovered that bumblebees can detect
when bees were given a learning test they were faster at learning the difference between two colours
How then do bees detect electric fields? This is not yet known although the researchers speculate that hairy bumblebees bristle up under the electrostatic force just like one's hair in front of an old television screen.
The last thing a flower wants is to attract a bee and then fail to provide nectar:
a lesson in honest advertising since bees are good learners and would soon lose interest in such an unrewarding flower.
The co-evolution between flowers and bees has a long and beneficial history so perhaps it's not entirely surprising that we are still discovering today how remarkably sophisticated their communication is.
--whereas the communicative waggles of bees or the short audible messages of primates are more like the lexical layer.
Bees communicate visually using precise waggles to indicate sources of foods to their peers; other primates can make a range of sounds comprising warnings about predators and other messages.
We can communicate essential information like bees or primates--but like birds we also have a melodic capacity
If this is right then human language has a precursor in nature in evolution that we can actually test today he says adding that bees birds
#Bees attracted to contrasting colors when looking for nectarflower colors that contrast with their background are more important to foraging bees than patterns of colored veins on pale flowers according to new research by Heather Whitney from the University of Cambridge in the UK and her colleagues.
Their observation of how patterns of pigmentation on flower petals influence bumblebees'behavior suggests that color veins give clues to the location of the nectar.
however that bees have an innate preference for striped flowers. The work is published online in Springer's journal Naturwissenschaften--The Science of Nature.
Bees can identify and are attracted sometimes to patterned flowers over plain flowers. These patterns can increase the speed with
which bees locate the nectar reward in a flower. Venation patterns--or lines of color on flower petals--are common in Antirrhinum flowers commonly known as snapdragons.
They exposed bees who had seen not flowers before to veined ivory and red types of snapdragon flowers.
They observed whether bees could distinguish between ivory and veined flowers and which type of flower they preferred
From the bees'perspective red flowers reflected little light while red veins on ivory flowers slightly changed the color of the flower.
Bees successfully discriminated between ivory and veined flowers but showed no preference for one or the other.
But it appears that the color contrast of a flower with its background has a greater influence on bee preference.
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