A $1.2 million Rosetta stone for honeybees

W.M. Keck grant helps scientists decipher bee language

University of California - Riverside

 

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UCR entomologists Barbara Baer-Imhoof and Boris Baer at the apiary.

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Credit: Stan Lim/UCR

If you upset one bee, what determines whether the entire hive decides to avenge her grievance? A $1.2 million grant will support UC Riverside scientists in answering questions like these about how honeybees communicate.

Every third bite of food you eat has been pollinated by a bee. They are central to worldwide food production, but there have been an alarming number of die-offs recorded since 2006.  One solution to this issue is the use of special survivor bees that are more resistant to pests and diseases that are killing managed honeybees. 

Commonly found in Southern California, the survivor bees appear to be tolerant of deadly mites as well as extreme heat and drought. Genetically, they are the most diverse honeybees in the world, with a mix of African and European genes. However, they tend to behave with more defensiveness than the European-origin honeybees currently used for agriculture. 

Defensive behaviors can include bumping beekeeper veils, chasing, or stinging entities perceived as threats. To breed these behaviors out of the bees, scientists need to know what triggers them.

“If we understand what stresses out the survivor bees, that can inform different beekeeping strategies, as well as a breeding program to help unravel the defensiveness,” said UCR entomologist Barbara Baer-Imhoof, who is co-leading this program alongside UCR colleagues, entomologist Boris Baer and insect neuroscientist Ysabel Giraldo.

Baer and Baer-Imhoof run CIBER, the Center for Integrative Bee Research at UCR, where they study stressors responsible for the decline in bee health, and work on solutions to those problems, including new tools for monitoring the health of bees in managed hives. 

For this grant, the researchers will determine how environmental threats are perceived and processed by individual bees, and then eventually how they are communicated to other members of the hive. This communication chain is a fundamental but still unsolved challenge in science. 

Another aspect to this grant from the W.M. Keck Foundation is learning whether scientists ought to reconsider how they view bee societies. In addition to inter-bee communication, the project will ascertain how honeybees transmit information to subsequent generations of progeny, beyond the lifespan of any one generation. 

Because hives can retain information, the researchers argue there should be a paradigm shift in the way bees are studied. “The fact that they are able to do this can be considered a cultural achievement,” said Baer. 

Like human societies, there is a lot of variation amongst individual members.

“Some bees have different personalities. They’re not like little robots that give the same predictable response to every smell or situation. Why? That’s part of what we want to know,” Baer said. 

As the bees employ a combination of vibrations, chemicals, smells, sounds, and movements to communicate, Giraldo’s laboratory will use genetic tools to learn about the brain cells controlling these interactions.

“The tools we have are powerful enough to allow us to understand the responses of individual brain regions in real time, and give us a high-resolution picture of what’s happening, Giraldo said.

The bee has only a million brain cells, which is not much compared to mice, which have an average of 70 million neurons. However, bees can solve math equations and dance for one another.

“They can do complicated things,” Baer said. “They must be extremely efficient on an individual level to use the available brain power for complex tasks like these.”

Based in Los Angeles, the W. M. Keck Foundation was established in 1954 by the late W. M. Keck, founder of the Superior Oil Company. The foundation’s grant-making is focused primarily on pioneering efforts in the areas of medical research and science and engineering.  The foundation also supports undergraduate education and maintains a Southern California Grant Program that provides support for the Los Angeles community, with a special emphasis on children and youth.  For more information, visit www.wmkeck.org

“On behalf of the UCR community, I extend our sincere thanks to the W.M. Keck Foundation,” said Chancellor Kim Wilcox. “Funding from the foundation will support innovative projects that aim to develop new strategies for understanding and protecting bees. These efforts are crucial as pollinators play a key role in the health of ecosystems and the production of food worldwide.” 

Listen to Boris Baer and Barbara Baer-Imhoof discuss killer bees' role in shaping the agriculture of the future, here.

Honeybees in the wild.

Credit

Stan Lim/UCRZZ

Replacement crop treatment not safe for important pollinator, experts say

University of Bristol

 

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Bee nesting blocks for solitary bees (Osmia lignaria)

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Credit: Harry Siviter

A novel pesticide thought to be a potential successor to banned neonicotinoids caused 100% mortality in mason bees in a recent test.

The novel pesticide, flupyradifurone, is thought to pose less risk to pollinators and consequently has been licenced globally for use on bee-visited crops.

However, research by scientists at the University of Bristol and the University of Texas at Austin, discovered, contrary to their expectations, that the chemical was lethal in the bees Osmia lignaria exposed to pesticide-treated wildflowers.

They also found a number of sublethal effects. Seven days post-application, bees released into the pesticide-treated plants were less likely to start nesting, had lower survival rates, and were less efficient foragers, taking 12.78% longer on average to collect pollen and nectar than control bees.

Lead author Harry Siviter from Bristol’s School of Biological Sciences explained: “These results demonstrate that exposure to flupyradifurone poses a significant risk to important pollinators and can have negative impacts on wild bees at field-realistic concentrations.”

Bees are vital pollinators of crops and wildflowers. Neonicotinoid pesticides can have significant negative impacts on pollinators which have led to high profile restrictions in their use in the EU, and other regions, which has increased the demand for ‘novel’ insecticides.

“Due to limitations in formal ecotoxicology assessments, there is an urgent need to evaluate potential replacement crop treatments,” added Harry.

“These results caution against the use of novel insecticides as a direct replacement for neonicotinoids.

“Our findings add to a growing body of evidence demonstrating that pesticide risk assessments do not sufficiently protect wild bees from the negative consequences of pesticide use.”

To avoid continuing cycles of novel pesticide release and removal, with concomitant impacts on the environment, the team say a broad evidence base needs to be assessed prior to the development of policy and regulation.

Harry said: “Restricting the use of commercial pesticides containing flupyradifurone to non-flowering crops would be sensible while more research is conducted.

“In the long-term, as we are already seeing in the EU, a move towards a more holistic approach to risk assessment that considers the biology of non-Apis bees is required to better protect pollinators from the unintended negative impacts of pesticides.”

The team now plan to extend their research to measuring the impact of exposure through soil on solitary bees.

Solitary bees (Osmia lignaria), tagged with paint, foraging on wildflower (Phacelia tanacetifolia).

Credit

Harry Sivite

Paper:

‘A novel pesticide has lethal consequences for an important pollinator’ by Harry Siviter et al in Science of the Total Environment.

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Journal

Science of The Total Environment

Method of Research

Observational study

Subject of Research

Animals

Article Title

A novel pesticide has lethal consequences for an important pollinator

Article Publication Date

5-Sep-2024