Influence of Pollen Nutrition on Honey Bee Health: Do Pollen Quality and Diversity Matter?

By Garance Di Pasquale, M. Salignon, Y. Le Conte, Luc P. Belzunces, A. Decourtye, A. Kretzschmar, S. Suchail, J. Brunet, C. Alaux. PLoS ONE, 2013

832 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Honey bee colonies are highly dependent upon the availability of floral resources from which they get the nutrients (notably pollen) necessary to their development and survival. However, foraging areas are currently affected by the intensification of agriculture and landscape alteration. Bees are therefore confronted to disparities in time and space of floral resource abundance, type and diversity, which might provide inadequate nutrition and endanger colonies. The beneficial influence of pollen availability on bee health is well-established but whether quality and diversity of pollen diets can modify bee health remains largely unknown. We therefore tested the influence of pollen diet quality (different monofloral pollens) and diversity (polyfloral pollen diet) on the physiology of young nurse bees, which have a distinct nutritional physiology (e.g. hypopharyngeal gland development and vitellogenin level), and on the tolerance to the microsporidian parasite Nosema ceranae by measuring bee survival and the activity of different enzymes potentially involved in bee health and defense response (glutathione-S-transferase (detoxification), phenoloxidase (immunity) and alkaline phosphatase (metabolism)). We found that both nurse bee physiology and the tolerance to the parasite were affected by pollen quality. Pollen diet diversity had no effect on the nurse bee physiology and the survival of healthy bees. However, when parasitized, bees fed with the polyfloral blend lived longer than bees fed with monofloral pollens, excepted for the protein-richest monofloral pollen. Furthermore, the survival was positively correlated to alkaline phosphatase activity in healthy bees and to phenoloxydase activities in infected bees. Our 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.

Subfields: Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics, Genetics, Insect Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/4b4d5f2215e8483332c080c425a43fd832ce0746

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics

In Genetics

In Insect Science

Citations in the corpus

Pollen nutrients better explain bumblebee colony development than pollen diversity (2017, background): “The nutritional content of pollen (i.e. proteins, amino acids, sterols and vitamins) may differ greatly from one plant species to another (e.g. Roulston et al., 2000; Di Pasquale et al., 2013; Vanderplanck et al., 2014).”
Protecting an ecosystem service: approaches to understanding and mitigating threats to wild insect pollinators (2016, background): “…may support a wider range of pollinators (Dicks et al., 2010), and floral richness is as 1029 important as floral abundance, with insect pollinators shown to have increased growth rates 1030 and immuno-competence from being fed diverse diets (Di Pasquale et al., 2013; Vaudo et al., 1031 2015).”
Gauging the Effect of Honey Bee Pollen Collection on Native Bee Communities (2017, background): “…inadequate summer floral pasture results in poor colony nutrition, reduced brood rearing, and scant winter food stores, circumstances that undermine the health of many managed commercial colonies (e.g., Di Pasquale et al. 2013) in the months after completing their primary crop pollination duties.”
A survey of managed honey bee colony losses in the Republic of South Africa–2009 to 2011 (2014, methodology): “…of the responding beekeepers were explored by calculating and comparing average operational losses using the Kruskal-Wallis rank sum test (vanEngelsdorp et al., 2010) when assumptions of normality were not met, and student’s t test/ANNOVA when assumptions of normality were met (Pirk et al., 2013).”
Assessment of pollen rewards by foraging bees (2017, background): “…Schmidt, Thoenes & Levin 1987; Schmidt et al. 1995; Genissel et al. 2002; Roulston & Cane 2002; Tasei & Aupinel 2008; Sedivy, M€uller & Dorn 2011; Di Pasquale et al. 2013), and so it has often been postulated that bees would stand to benefit by being selective in the pollen they choose to collect.”
Weeds for bees? A review (2015, background): “…loss, recent work eventually led to a new paradigm: bee decline results from a complex set of interacting drivers (Ratnieks and Carreck 2010; Di Pasquale et al. 2013; Alaux et al. 2010; VanEngelsdorp et al. 2009;Potts et al. 2010a), including honeybee husbandry practices (e.g. Varroa is an…”
Floral abundance and resource quality influence pollinator choice (2016, background): “…bees generate and retain heat faster leading to earlier and more frequent forage flights (Stone, 1993), they have greater diapause survival (Strohm & Linsenmair, 1997) and are better able to cope with adverse conditions such as parasitism and disease (Alaux et al., 2010; Di Pasquale et al., 2013).”
Phenology of farmland floral resources reveals seasonal gaps in nectar availability for bumblebees (2019, background): “The immunocompetence of honeybees has been shown to reduce with a less varied diet (Alaux, Ducloz, Crauser, & Le Conte, 2010; Di Pasquale et al., 2013) and it is likely that the same is true for bumblebees.”
Significance of Apoidea as Main Pollinators. Ecological and Economic Impact and Implications for Human Nutrition (2020, background): “The influence of pollen diet quality and diversity on the physiology of young nurse honey bees has been investigated [64].”