Honeybees prioritize well-fed larvae for emergency
By Chris Branam, Oregon State University sured how many queens were reared to New research shows that honeybees pupation from each treatment group. prioritize the nutritional status of larvae When experimental colonies were alwhen selecting for a new emergency queen. The U.S. Department of Agriculturelowed to select deprived or non-deprived funded study is published in the journal larvae for queen rearing under the natural Scientific Reports (https://www.nature. emergency queen rearing method, a sigcom/articles/s41598-018-25976-7) and nificantly higher number of queens were is the result of a research collaboration reared from the non-deprived treatment between entomologists at Oregon State group than from the deprived treatment University (OSU) and North Carolina State group. University. There was no significant difference in This is the first study that has thoroughly the percentage of larvae selected for queen investigated the role of nutritional state of rearing between larvae that were genetilarvae in their selection for queen rearing, cally related or not related to the nurses. said lead author Ramesh Sagili, associ“The bees were still selecting larvae for queen rearing mainly based on deprived ate professor of apiculture and honeybee and non-deprived nutritional states,” said Extension specialist in OSU’s College of Sagili, who helped create the Oregon MasAgricultural Sciences. Honeybee colony fitness is dependent ter Beekeeper Program in 2010 and chaired on queens, so their production is a vital the Governor’s Task Force on Pollinator task. If the current queen dies, emergency Health in 2014. queens must be reared. Worker bees then Study co-authors are Hannah Lucas, select few larvae from the existing pool Priyadarshini Chakrabarti and Carolyn to raise new queens. The colony only has Breece – all researchers at OSU’s Honey about six days after the last egg was laid Bee Lab (http://honeybeelab.oregonstate. to begin rearing new queens. edu) – and Brad Metz at N.C. State’s Honey “It’s all about survival,” Sagili said. Bee Queen and Disease Clinic. “The bees have to pick the most fit individual to lead the colony. The queen is the most vital individual in the hive. There was some thought in the past that maybe it was ‘kinship’ or ‘nepotism’ selection, in which the workers recognize their close relatives [same father and mother] and rear those larvae preferentially to make queens.” Poor queen quality has been one of the top concerns of the beekeeping industry in the United States for the past decade. Each year approximately 1.5 million honeybee queens are reared and sold to beekeepers in the United States. This study provides valuable insights pertaining to honeybee queen rearing that could benefit a beekeeping industry that is struggling, according to Sagili. Because previous research has shown that worker bees can differentiate hungry larvae from wellfed larvae, the researchers decided to test whether nutritional state was a factor in selecting which larvae to rear as emergency queens. They established observation hives in which they artificially deprived one group of larvae of brood food – known as royal jelly – while allowing the other group to be fed, and then measured nurse bee responses to those larvae. They also compared two queen-rearing methods – grafting and natural. For each method, they created groups of deprived and non-deprived larvae, placed them in experimental colonies experiencing emergency queen-rearing conditions and then mea-
Trader’s Dispatch, December 2018 — Page B31
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