Diet effects on honeybee immunocompetence
TLDR
A link between protein nutrition and immunity in honeybees and the critical role of resource availability on pollinator health is suggested and the importance of diet diversity is underscored.Abstract:
The maintenance of the immune system can be costly, and a lack of dietary protein can increase the susceptibility of organisms to disease. However, few studies have investigated the relationship between protein nutrition and immunity in insects. Here, we tested in honeybees (Apis mellifera) whether dietary protein quantity (monofloral pollen) and diet diversity (polyfloral pollen) can shape baseline immunocompetence (IC) by measuring parameters of individual immunity (haemocyte concentration, fat body content and phenoloxidase activity) and glucose oxidase (GOX) activity, which enables bees to sterilize colony and brood food, as a parameter of social immunity. Protein feeding modified both individual and social IC but increases in dietary protein quantity did not enhance IC. However, diet diversity increased IC levels. In particular, polyfloral diets induced higher GOX activity compared with monofloral diets, including protein-richer diets. These results suggest a link between protein nutrition and immunity in honeybees and underscore the critical role of resource availability on pollinator health.read more
Citations
More filters
Journal ArticleDOI
Threats to an ecosystem service: pressures on pollinators
TL;DR: It is argued that multiple anthropogenic pressures – including land-use intensification, climate change, and the spread of alien species and diseases – are primarily responsible for insect-pollinator declines.
Journal ArticleDOI
Nutrition and health in honey bees
TL;DR: The potential of different diets to meet nutritional requirements or to improve survival or brood production is outlined, and nutrition-related risks to honey bee colonies such as starvation, monocultures, genetically modified crops and pesticides in pollen and nectar are discussed.
Journal ArticleDOI
Influence of pollen nutrition on honey bee health: do pollen quality and diversity matter?
Garance Di Pasquale,Marion Salignon,Yves Le Conte,Luc P. Belzunces,Axel Decourtye,André Kretzschmar,Séverine Suchail,Jean Luc Brunet,Cédric Alaux +8 more
TL;DR: The results support the idea that both the quality and diversity (in a specific context of pollen can shape bee physiology and might help to better understand the influence of agriculture and land-use intensification on bee nutrition and health.
Journal ArticleDOI
Functional complementarity and specialisation: The role of biodiversity in plant–pollinator interactions
TL;DR: This work proposes several mechanisms that generate complementarity and suggests that a higher diversity of pollinators contributes to an increased pollination success of the plants or, in turn, that aHigher diversity of flowers may better sustain the consumers’ requirements.
Journal ArticleDOI
Miscellaneous standard methods for Apis mellifera research
Hannelie Human,Robert Brodschneider,Vincent Dietemann,Galen P. Dively,James D. Ellis,Eva Forsgren,Ingemar Fries,Fani Hatjina,Fuliang Hu,Rodolfo Jaffé,Annette Bruun Jensen,Angela Köhler,Josef P Magyar,Asli Özkýrým,Christian Walter Werner Pirk,Robyn Rose,Ursula Strauss,Gina Tanner,David R. Tarpy,Jozef J. M. van der Steen,Anthony D. Vaudo,Fleming Vejsnæs,Jerzy Wilde,Geoffrey R. Williams,Huoqing Zheng +24 more
TL;DR: These methods, described in this paper, are especially valuable when investigating the effects of pesticide applications, environmental pollution and diseases on colony survival.
References
More filters
The International Organization for Standardization.
TL;DR: The provided compressed bitstreams were uncompressed using provided software and the resulting sequences were compared to the original ones in terms of PSNR and it seems that last frames from some cameras give significantly worse PSNR than the rest of frames.
Journal ArticleDOI
Trade‐offs in evolutionary immunology: just what is the cost of immunity?
TL;DR: It is concluded that sufficient evidence exists to support the primary assumption that immunological defences are costly to the vertebrate host and how costly it might be for a host who is forced to up-regulate its immunological defence mechanisms.
Journal ArticleDOI
Amino acids and immune function
TL;DR: Increasing evidence shows that dietary supplementation of specific amino acids to animals and humans with malnutrition and infectious disease enhances the immune status, thereby reducing morbidity and mortality.
Journal ArticleDOI
Immune pathways and defence mechanisms in honey bees Apis mellifera
Jay D. Evans,Kate Aronstein,Yanping Chen,Charles Hetru,J-L Imler,Haobo Jiang,Michael R. Kanost,Graham J. Thompson,Zhen Zou,Dan Hultmark +9 more
TL;DR: It is suggested that an implied reduction in immune flexibility in bees reflects either the strength of social barriers to disease, or a tendency for bees to be attacked by a limited set of highly coevolved pathogens.
Journal ArticleDOI
Evolutionary ecology of insect immune defenses
TL;DR: In insect immune defense, the field is now rapidly becoming revolutionized by molecular data and methods that allow unprecedented access to study evolution in action, and much more similar to that of vertebrates than previously thought.
Related Papers (5)
Bee declines driven by combined stress from parasites, pesticides, and lack of flowers
A historical review of managed honey bee populations in Europe and the United States and the factors that may affect them.
A Metagenomic Survey of Microbes in Honey Bee Colony Collapse Disorder
Diana Cox-Foster,Sean Conlan,Edward C. Holmes,Edward C. Holmes,Gustavo Palacios,Jay D. Evans,Nancy A. Moran,Phenix Lan Quan,Thomas Briese,Mady Hornig,David M. Geiser,Vince Martinson,Dennis vanEngelsdorp,Dennis vanEngelsdorp,Abby L. Kalkstein,Andrew T. Drysdale,Jeffrey Hui,Junhui Zhai,Liwang Cui,Stephen K. Hutchison,Jan Fredrik Simons,Michael Egholm,Jeffery S. Pettis,W. Ian Lipkin +23 more