The researchers, who are from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, suggest that good nutrition can bolster bee resilience against pesticides and viruses. The findings reveal the multifaceted forces that impact honey bee health.
Stressors: Walking the Line
Modern agriculture stresses honey bees on multiple fronts: they suffer from poor nutrition, are infected with numerous viruses and other pathogens (particularly the fungal parasite Nosema ceranae), and are exposed to a variety of agricultural pesticides. Though researchers at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign note that prior work has studied one or two of these aspects, none have explored them all.
The team found that better nutrition had a big impact on the bees’ ability to combat these three stressors combined. This is a critical discovery since multiple stressors are frequently deadly for honey bees. Thus, the context-specificity of these interactions further underscores the importance of understanding bee biology overall in accounting for bee health.
Edward Hsieh, lead on the study, said, “Many stressors are bad for survival — that’s probably universally true: major insults often result in death. However it would seem impossible to make blanket statements on how these interactive effects impact honey bees without knowledge of all of the confounding factors involved.
The Power of Nutrition
What they found was interesting and informative. Artificial pollen diets and exposure to Israeli Acute Paralysis Virus resulted in a significant increase of mortality in bees. That situation was compounded when the bees were also exposed to a mixture of pesticides.
But the tale took a different turn when the bees were fed a natural, high-quality nutrition pollen diet. In this instance, bees still showed increased sensitivity to the virus, but fewer of them died when they were also exposed to a combination of the insecticide chlorpyrifos and a fungicide
Professor Adam Dolezal said: “Bees may have an inherent ability to detoxify these chemicals, but you think of all of the other stress they’re very likely facing — maybe a low-level exposure to a pesticide helps keep their stress level in balance so that when it gets infected with something else, like a virus or fungus exposure or even trypanosome parasite, which are just few things bees might face during bouts of colony collapse disease. This is obviously the case, but it only functions provided they have dietary resources to accomplish it”
Conclusion
A glimmer of hope in the coming years for honey bees, it seems. By decoding the tangled webs of nutrition, pesticides, and viruses, scientists may be able to devise more sophisticated ways of bolstering these essential pollinators. How bees are exposed to pesticides — even at low levels — can shape effects on bee healthWith more than a decade of data, we figured we could say”yes” to this question. In the future, a holistic strategy targeting multiple stressors (while focusing on nutrition) may prevent global extinction of honey bee populations.
