Who, what, why: How do you track a honey bee?

By Denise WintermanBBC News Magazine

The latest research investigating why honey bees are dying involves tracking the small insects, but how do you track a bee?

Bee numbers have been falling dramatically and scientists are trying to understand why. In the past 25 years honey bee numbers in England have more than halved and they are still decreasing. It is a similar story elsewhere in the UK and in other countries.

Bees of all types - there are hundreds of them - play a huge role in the life of the countryside and a third of what we eat is reliant on bee pollination. Studying the behaviour of these complex insects is crucial to finding out what is happening but it is also a big challenge.

The answer

• A tiny antenna is glued to the thorax of the insect
• A radar transmitter emits a signal
• A diode in the centre of the antenna converts it into a unique signal that researchers can track

 honey bee can visit several thousand flowers in one day and navigate over several kilometres, so how do you track one?

Scientists are using harmonic radar technology. A radar transmitter emits a signal which is received by a tiny antenna glued on a honey bee's thorax (back). A small diode in the centre of the antenna converts it into a different wavelength that can be detected and followed.

The converted signal is unique. There is no other source in the environment, so scientists know it's the tagged honey bee. A portable radar tracking station is used to transmit the signal and gather the information sent back.

The system was developed by scientists at the Natural Resources Institute and is operated by scientists at Rothamsted Research, a government-funded agricultural research centre in Hertfordshire. It's currently being used in several major research projects.

Read more at:http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-23448846

Honeybees Self-Medicate with Anti-Fungal Resin

The Honey, Garlic And Vinegar Miracle, Click Here!

Propolis (yellow) lining the inside of a beehive.

Beekeepers would love to get rid of propolis, a sticky substance made of resins that bees use to line their hives, because it makes it hard to pry hives open. But propolis isn’t just gluing the hive together, according to a new study published in PLoS ONE—honeybees use it to fight off fungal infections and seek it out when their hives are infected.

Bees have to invest effort in hunting down the resins that make up propolis, which like nectar is foraged from plants. That means that every minute a bee is looking for resin is a minute it’s not looking for food. The trade-off is worth it, apparently, because propolis kills bacteria and fungi lurking in the colony.

In this new study, the authors looked at whether propolis helped stop a fungal infection called chalkbrood that kills larvae. When experimenters painted propolis extract on hives, these propolis-enriched hives had lower rates of chalkbrood infection. And when colonies got infected with chalkbrood, bees went looking for resins more often. That’s where things get interesting because the adult bees doing the foraging are not directly affected by chalkbrood—it only lurks in larvae—so the “self”-medication happens at the level of colony instead of the individual bee. Honey bees, which are eusocial insects, really act together to benefit the entire colony rather than just themselves.

Image via Wikimedia Commons / Abalg

Read more at: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/80beats/?p=36183#.Uf0saNJTCSo

Substances in honey increase detoxification gene expression, team finds

Research in the wake of Colony Collapse Disorder, a mysterious malady afflicting (primarily commercial) honey bees, suggests that pests, pathogens and pesticides all play a role. 

New research indicates that the honey bee diet influences the bees’ ability to withstand at least some of these assaults. Some components of the nectar and pollen grains bees collect to manufacture food to support the hive increase the expression of detoxification genes that help keep honey bees healthy. 

The findings appear in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 

University of Illinois professor of entomology May Berenbaum, who led the study, said that many organisms use a group of enzymes called cytochrome P450 monooxygenases to break down foreign substances such as pesticides and compounds naturally found in plants, known as phytochemicals. However, honey bees have relatively few genes dedicated to this detoxification process compared to other insect species, she said. 

“Bees feed on hundreds of different types of nectar and pollen, and are potentially exposed to thousands of different types of phytochemicals, yet they only have one-third to one-half the inventory of enzymes that break down these toxins compared to other species,” Berenbaum said. 

Determining which of the 46 P450 genes in the honey bee genome are used to metabolize constituents of their natural diet and which are used to metabolize synthetic pesticides became a “tantalizing scientific question” to her research team, Berenbaum said. 

“Every frame of honey (in the honey bee hive) is phytochemically different from the next frame of honey because different nectars went in to make the honey. If you don’t know what your next meal is going to be, how does your detoxification system know which enzymes to upregulate?” Berenbaum said. 

Research had previously shown that eating honey turns on detoxification genes that metabolize the chemicals in honey, but the researchers wanted to identify the specific components responsible for this activity. To do this, they fed bees a mixture of sucrose and powdered sugar, called bee candy, and added different chemical components in extracts of honey. They identified p-coumaric acid as the strongest inducer of the detoxification genes. 

“We found that the perfect signal, p-coumaric acid, is in everything that bees eat – it’s the monomer that goes into the macromolecule called sporopollenin, which makes up the outer wall of pollen grains. It’s a great signal that tells their systems that food is coming in, and with that food, so are potential toxins,” Berenbaum said. 

Her team showed that p-coumaric acid turns on not only P450 genes, but representatives of every other type of detoxification gene in the genome. This signal can also turn on honey bee immunity genes that code for antimicrobial proteins. 

According to Berenbaum, three other honey constituents were effective inducers of these detoxification enzymes. These components probably originate in the tree resins that bees use to make propolis, the “bee glue” which lines all of the cells and seals cracks within a hive. 

“Propolis turns on immunity genes – it’s not just an antimicrobial caulk or glue. It may be medicinal, and in fact, people use it medicinally, too,” Berenbaum said. 

Many commercial beekeepers use honey substitutes such as high-fructose corn syrup or sugar water to feed their colonies. Berenbaum believes the new research shows that honey is “a rich source of biologically active materials that truly matter to a bee.” 

She hopes that future testing and development will yield honey substitutes that contain p-coumaric acid so beekeepers can enhance their bees’ ability to withstand pathogens and pesticides. 

Although she doesn’t recommend that beekeepers “rush out and dump p-coumaric acid into their high fructose corn syrup,” she hopes that her team’s research can be used as the basis of future work aimed at improving bee health. 

“If I were a beekeeper, I would at least try to give them some honey year-round,” Berenbaum said, “because if you look at the evolutionary history of Apis mellifera, this species did not evolve with high fructose corn syrup. It is clear that honey bees are highly adapted to consuming honey as part of their diet.”


Read more at http://scienceblog.com/65330/substances-in-honey-increase-detoxification-gene-expression-team-finds/#lQQFHftritFxzZwm.99