A groundbreaking study reveals that providing high-quality nutrition to honey bees can significantly enhance their resilience against the combined threats of pesticides and viral infections, offering a glimmer of hope in the fight to save these crucial pollinators.
Tackling the Trifecta
It also details a remarkable effort by other scholars at the University of Illinois to tackle one such big question: how does nutritional stress, combined with viral infection and pesticide exposure, affect honeybee survival?
The new study, which analyzed the relationships between these factors for each of thousands of trips to schools throughout Texas, stands out among previous research in including all of them. For example, as graduate student and lead author Edward Hsieh says: “Multiple stressors are frequently bad for survival, but it all depends on the context. When you are making a broad statement about the effects of interactive effects on honey bees, all these factors come into play.
The Power of Proper Nutrition
Overall, the most important result from this research is that a superior pollen diet (or rather, higher dietary quality) can buffer honey bees against both the amebicidin pesticide and IAPV infections.
Bees fed on an artificial pollen diet, along with israeli acute paralysis virus resulted in a high rate of bee mortality. The death rate soared even higher, however, when the virus was combined with exposure to pesticide.
This story dramatically changed when the bees went on to a natural pollen diet. Even though both treatments came with an additional cost, the cocktail with chlorpyrifos and a fungicide only resulted in lower bee death rates upon virus exposure.
Professor Adam Dolezal says: ‘Bees are able to cope with some stress and if you give them a small amount of stress like a low-level exposure to pesticide, it may help them deal with more severe stresses from other sources such as the virus. But only if they have the food to use those tools it would seem.
Conclusion
The research offers a rare sign of hope in the battle to preserve honey bees — a leading pollinator that is grappling with severe population plunges. The key finding of the paper is that it shows that feeding bees good, nutritious food helps them to resist the onslaught of pesticides and virusesthe double-whammy impact of the two most serious threats currently facing these key pollinators — and in a simple way this could provide some solutions. This does not imply that pesticides are not a problem as the researchers stress; rather, it suggests that bees may be better able to cope with such challenges when they are well nourished and their natural defenses in order. This study starts a momentum toward constructing much more comprehensive honey bee preservation strategies and maintainable farming techniques.
