For Good of the Colony, Sick Honey Bee Brood Sounds the Alarm By Kaira Wagoner, Ph.D.

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bee biology, biology, honey bee biology, honey bee brood, sick bees

Pollinator health is a top priority these days, and everyone seems to be asking, “What can be done to save the bees?” Since most of the current challenges to pollinator health can be attributed to humans, there are several things we can do, from restoring pollinator habitat by planting pollinator-friendly natives to curbing our use of harmful pesticides.

This work is both ecologically and economically important, as honey bees are the most agriculturally important pollinator worldwide, contributing over $15 billion to annual crop yields in the United States alone. But honey bees have flourished on Earth for over 100 million years, so perhaps it is also worth asking, “What can honey bees do to help themselves?”

As social insects, closely related honey bees live in crowded colonies with frequent physical contact, a recipe for the rapid spread of parasites and pathogens. As a result, honey bees have evolved some fascinating social immune mechanisms, which help mitigate the spread of disease between sisters in a bustling colony. One such immune mechanism is “hygienic behavior,” the ability of adult bees to detect and remove unhealthy brood from the colony. By sacrificing a few unhealthy young, the overall health of the colony, and thus the probability of colony survival, is improved.

Read the fill article here: For Good of the Colony, Sick Honey Bee Brood Sounds the Alarm — Entomology Today

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The Background Hum – Drones by Why Do Bees

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biology, drones, honey bee biology

They’re freeloaders yet vital to the colony’s success. Most of the time they’re laid back bordering on lazy, yet they give it all to their mission when pheromones beckon, dying in the process. They’re allowed to play in the hive all season then bullied out in the fall. It’s all about colony survival. In a healthy hive, drones are the background hum, the harmony behind the melody, a small but important part of the symphony.

Read the full article at: The Background Hum — Why Do Bees

I didn’t know what I didn’t know by Altamont Farms

Tags

beekeeping, biology, education, learning curve, management

An excellent assessment of the beekeeping learning curve with some good advice.

In 2016 I developed an urge to add bees to our thriving urban farm here in Emerald Hills. The gardens were producing year round, our chickens were productive, and I was exploring a lot of interesting technology for monitoring and irrigation. I needed a new project, honey bees.

I bought a hive from a guy on Craigslist who discovered one of his children was allergic to bee stings and decided to sell off his hives. Easy, everything was already functioning. I put the hive in my garden in what I would later learn is a bad location (afternoon sun only and positioned in a manner that wind would blow into the opening) and didn’t really know what I was looking at when I inspected the hive.

Lesson learned: I didn’t know what I didn’t know. 

(continued at link below)

Read the entire article here: My two year beekeeping journey — Altamont Farms

The Secrets of Royal Jelly – Roald Dahl’s version by wiggledanceforme

Tags

biology, book review, fiction

I have always thought this story is an unsettling mix between fact and fiction. Is the crazy beekeeper Albert Taylor for real? Is he serious about feeding his malnourished daughter tons and tons of royal jelly to make her nice and plump?

Eccentric character Albert Tayler refers to beekeeping magazines and scientific research discussing the great benefits of the magical royal substance. He tries to convince his wife with the “scientific facts”. For a long time I have wondered whether these scientific articles were real, or whether the amazing imagination of Roald Dahl had exceeded to the next level. Today, I want to find out.

Read the full article at: The Secrets of Royal Jelly – Roald Dahl’s version. — wiggledanceforme

And if this bit of fiction spurs an interest in science:

Secret of royal jelly’s super-sizing effect on queen bees appears to be special protein royalactin. 27 April 2011, by Bob Yirka. (PhysOrg.com) — In a paper published in Nature,. Japanese researcher Masaki Kamakura describes a process he used to determine that the protein royalactin, is at least one of the components. of fiction spurs an interest in science: [PDF] Secret of royal jelly’s super-sizing effect on queen bees … – Phys.org 

and

in royal jelly that enables the larvae to develop into queens, but rather the optimally balanced composition of the diet – and the fact that the nurse bees feed the queen bee larvae up to 10 times more frequently. The secret of the caste system in honeybee colonies evidently lies in specific genetic programming of the larva … [PDF]Jelly Fit for a Queen – Max-Planck-Gesellschaft

Sex between species: what happens when invasive honey bees meet the locals? by Ros Gloag

Tags

apis cerana, apis melifera, biology, honey bee biology, honey bee genetics

Some social insects have proved to be adept invaders. Assisted by the international trade of the modern world, these species have spread far beyond the ocean and mountain barriers that once determined their distributions. In some cases, these range expansions have brought previously isolated sister species back into contact. What happens when such species try to mate?

We were interested in this question of interspecific mating in the case of two honey bees: the Western honey bee Apis mellifera and the Eastern honey (or hive) bee, Apis cerana. These species diverged from a common ancestor at least 6 million years ago, with A. mellifera native to Europe and Africa and A. cerana native to Asia and India. Western honey bees have of course since been transported, in association with agriculture, to every human-inhabited continent on earth. Eastern honey bees meanwhile, have been quietly expanding their range too in recent decades, invading both Papua New Guinea and Australia. Thus what were allopatric (or separate) ranges for millions of years have suddenly become partially sympatric.

Read entire article at:  Sex between species: what happens when invasive honey bees meet the locals? — insectessociaux

Cross-kingdom regulation of honeybee caste development by dietary plant miRNAs by Save The Bees Concert

Tags

biology, honey bee biology, honey bee genetics, honey bees, queens

Honeybee larvae develop into workers but not queens, in part, because their diet of beebread/pollen is enriched in plant miRNAs. While miRNAs are generally negative regulators of gene expression in eukaryotes, they also negatively regulate larval development when honeybee larvae consume beebread/pollen and take up plant miRNAs. Xi Chen and Chen-Yu Zhang’s group in Nanjing University, report this finding on August 31, 2017 in PLOS Genetics.

How caste has formed in honeybees is an enduring puzzle. Although queens and workers are genetically identical, queens are reproductive and have a larger body size, develop faster and live longer than workers. Prevailing view is that differential larval feeding determines caste differentiation: royal jelly stimulates the differentiation of larvae into queen, whereas beebread and pollen consumed by the rest of the larvae lead to the worker bee fate. However, it is still not fully understood how alterations in diet modify so thoroughly the developmental trajectory of honeybees.

In previous studies, Chen-Yu Zhang’s group has reported a striking finding that plant miRNAs are ingested from plant diets and pass through the gastrointestinal tract, enter into the blood, accumulate in tissues and regulate endogenous gene expression in animals. Their findings suggest that ingested exogenous miRNAs can regulate endogenous gene expression and reshape animal phenotypes. Interestingly, since the components of beebread/pollen are mainly plant materials and royal jelly is a glandular secretion of nurse bees, the diets for worker- and queen-destined larvae are differentially derived from plant- and animal-sources. Therefore, Xi Chen, Chen-Yu Zhang and colleagues decide to investigate if miRNAs from different larval diets may have distinct impacts on honeybee development.

Here, they report that plant miRNAs are more enriched in beebread/pollen than in royal jelly. While plant miRNAs of beebread/pollen are fed to larvae, they cause developmental delay and reductions in body and ovary size in honeybees; in contrast, miRNAs in the royal jelly are not sufficient to reach a functional level, therefore queen-destined larvae evade this regulation. Mechanistic studies reveal that amTOR, a stimulatory gene in caste differentiation, is the direct target of miR162a. Interestingly, ingested plant miRNAs have a similar inhibitory effect on fruit fly development, even though fruit fly is not a social insect. In summary, this study uncovers a new mechanism that plant miRNAs in larval diet of worker bees delay caste differentiation and keep ovaries inactive, thereby inducing sterile worker bees.

The findings of this study are important for the following reasons:

Read full article at:  Cross-kingdom regulation of honeybee caste development by dietary plant miRNAs — Save The Bees Concert

Beekeeping Vocabulary – “R” is for…

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apis melifera, beekeeping, biology, honey bee biology, honey bees, royal jelly

Larva floating in royal jelly By Waugsberg (Own work)

 

Today’s beekeeping vocabulary word is, “Royal Jelly.”

From Wikipedia:

Royal jelly is a honey bee secretion that is used in the nutrition of larvae, as well as adult queens.^[1] It is secreted from the glands in the hypopharynx of nurse bees, and fed to all larvae in the colony, regardless of sex or caste.^[2]

When worker bees decide to make a new queen, because the old one is either weakening or dead, they choose several small larvae and feed them with copious amounts of royal jelly in specially constructed queen cells. This type of feeding triggers the development of queen morphology, including the fully developed ovaries needed to lay eggs.^[3]

Royal jelly has long been sold as both a dietary supplement and alternative medicine. Both the European Food Safety Authority and United States Food and Drug Administration have concluded that the current evidence does not support the claim of health benefits, and have actively discouraged the sale and consumption of the jelly. In the United States, the Food and Drug Administration has taken legal action against companies that have used unfounded claims of health benefits to market royal jelly products. There have also been documented cases of allergic reactions, namely hives, asthma, and anaphylaxis, due to consumption of royal jelly.

Source and to read more: Wikipedia

Beekeeping Vocabulary: “Q” is for…

Tags

biology, honey bee biology, queens

Queen bee with attendants by Pollinator at English Wikipedia

 

Today’s beekeeping vocabulary word is, “Queen.”

Queen honey bees are created when worker bees feed a single female larvae an exclusive diet of a food called “royal jelly“.^[35][36]Queens are produced in oversized cells and develop in only 16 days; they differ in physiology, morphology, and behavior from worker bees. In addition to the greater size of the queen, she has a functional set of ovaries, and a spermatheca, which stores and maintains sperm after she has mated. Apis queens practice polyandry, with one female mating with multiple males. The highest documented mating frequency for an Apis queen is in Apis nigrocincta, where queens mate with an extremely high number of males with observed numbers of different matings ranging from 42 to 69 drones per queen.^[39]The sting of queens is not barbed like a worker’s sting, and queens lack the glands that produce beeswax. Once mated, queens may lay up to 2,000 eggs per day.^[36] They produce a variety of pheromones that regulate behavior of workers, and helps swarms track the queen’s location during the swarming.^[36]

Source Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honey_bee#Queens