Honeybee lifespan is half what it was 50 years ago

To Gary Hartley

bees Having only half the lifespan of the 1970s under laboratory conditions in the United States, genes may contribute to colony loss, and not just environmental factors such as: pesticide and food source.

Fifty years ago, the median lifespan of Western worker bees (Apis Melifera) spent 34.3 days in the adult stage in the controlled environment. The median is now 17.7 days. Anthony Nerman When Dennis Van Engelsdorp at the University of Maryland.

This work began as an experiment to examine the effects of supplementing regular water to a regular sugar-water diet in laboratory-reared bees. However, Niaman, who spent time examining the scientific literature on similar studies, observed a downward trend in lifespans from the 1970s to the present. Paradoxically, he found that the mortality rate had doubled since protocols for keeping bees in the lab were formalized in the 2000s.

This change means that the solution to shortened colony lifespans in the field, a problem increasingly faced by beekeepers, could be found in the bees themselves.

“For the most part, bees are domestic animals, so beekeepers and breeders often selectively breed from colonies with desirable traits, such as disease resistance,” says Niaman.

“In this case, choosing the disease resistance outcome could have been an inadvertent choice to shorten the lifespan of individual bees,” he says. Colonies with short-lived bees will look healthier because it reduces the chances.”

Despite the risk of trade-offs, the findings raise the possibility that longer-lived bees could be specially bred if the genetic factors that influence longevity could be isolated.

Experimental bees are collected from the hive as pupae from the hive within 24 hours of emerging from the hive. But the bees used in the current study showed no overt symptoms of such exposure, says Niaman.

Researchers began noting an increase in colony loss rates around 2006. Colony Collapse Disorder began killing large numbers of colonies in the United States. This obstacle subsided around his 2008, but colony loss rates remain higher than beekeepers consider economically viable, and it is unclear why.

The team’s modeling work showed that a 50% reduction in individual bee lifespans would result in an annual colony loss rate of 33%. beekeeper.

Further studies will examine trends in life expectancy in different regions of the United States and around the world to compare the relative influence of genetic and environmental factors.

“This creative study highlights the importance of worker longevity in determining the overall health of a honeybee colony.” Jean Robinson at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

“While we do not identify the underlying cause of the alarming decline in lifespan observed over the last 50 years, well-known environmental stressors such as pathogens, parasites, pesticides, and nutritional deficiencies may have contributed to bee genetics. It provides a useful framework for considering how we interact with and control lifespan,” he says. “Therefore, it makes an important contribution to our understanding of bee health.”

Journal reference: scientific report, DOI: 10.1038/s41598-022-21401-2

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