Scientists find clues to queen bee failure

Date:
September 8, 2020
Source:
University of British Columbia
Summary:
Scientists are unraveling the mysteries behind a persistent problem
in commercial beekeeping that is one of the leading causes of
colony mortality -- queen bee failure.



FULL STORY ========================================================================== Scientists at UBC are unravelling the mysteries behind a persistent
problem in commercial beekeeping that is one of the leading causes of
colony mortality - - queen bee failure.


==========================================================================
This occurs when the queen fails to produce enough fertilized eggs to
maintain the hive, and is regularly cited by the Canadian Association
of Professional Apiarists as one of the top causes of colony mortality.

In recent research outlined in BMC Genomics, University of British
Columbia and North Carolina State University researchers identified
specific proteins that are activated in queen bees under different
stressful conditions: extreme heat, extreme cold, and pesticide exposure
-- conditions that can affect the viability of the sperm stored in the
honey bee queen's body. If the queen does not have enough live sperm to
produce enough fertilized eggs to maintain its population of worker bees,
the colony will eventually die out.

Scientists then measured the levels of these markers in a collection of
queens in B.C. that had failed in the field, and found that they had
higher levels of heat-shock and pesticide protein markers compared to
healthy queens. The results pave the way for a future diagnostic test to
help beekeepers understand, and prevent, queen bee failure in the future.

"Currently, there isn't any method to actually figure out why the
queen has failed in a colony, and that's important because there are
quite a few different ways that that could happen," said lead author
Alison McAfee, a biochemist at the Michael Smith Labs at UBC and
postdoctoral fellow at NC State. "This is a very understudied area."
Previous research conducted by McAfee and her colleagues determined
that queens are safest when kept between 15 and 38 degrees Celsius, and identified five protein markers associated with heat-shock in queens. Now, McAfee has confirmed the two most identifiable biomarkers for heat-shock,
along with two protein markers useful for detecting cold-shock, and two associated with sublethal levels of pesticides. The findings open the
door to testing that will provide beekeepers with information needed to
ensure the long-term viability of their hives.

"We want to develop a diagnostic test that we can do on a failed queen,
which can provide the beekeeper with information on what happened to her
in the past that made her fail now," explained McAfee. "If we can do that reliably, then then the beekeeper could do more to try to prevent that
from happening in the future." Currently, beekeepers simply toss away a
failed queen. In the future, said McAfee, "they could ship her to a lab,
which would measure the abundance of all these different markers and
send a report with information on the likelihood of her being stressed by
cause X, Y and Z." When it came to failed queens from the field in B.C.,
the researchers were surprised to find elevated markers associated with
heat stress and, to a lesser extent, pesticide exposure.

"We didn't have any reason to believe that these queens were heat
shocked," said McAfee. "A substantial number of them had elevated levels
of those particular markers, which could mean that there is a lot more temperature stress going on out there than we would expect. It could also
be that those markers also become elevated due to other kinds of stresses
that we haven't looked at yet." The effect of extreme temperatures
on queen bees is a large concern for Canadian beekeepers who import
250,000 queen bees every year, primarily from Australia, New Zealand,
and the U.S. Hours spent in the cargo holds of airplanes and warehouses
can subject the queens to large fluctuations in temperature during their journey -- something McAfee has investigated in past work.

"Every time we put temperature loggers in queen shipments, we have
at least some of the shipments coming back is being outside of that
Goldilocks zone between 15 and 38 degrees, so I think that happens more frequently than we have been aware of," she said. "There are no rules
for shipping queens, such as including temperature loggers in their
shipments. Producers just ship them via whatever courier they choose,
and beekeepers are at the mercy of the shipper for handling the package properly."

========================================================================== Story Source: Materials provided by University_of_British_Columbia. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.


========================================================================== Journal Reference:
1. Alison McAfee, Joseph Milone, Abigail Chapman, Leonard J. Foster,
Jeffery
S. Pettis, David R. Tarpy. Candidate stress biomarkers for
queen failure diagnostics. BMC Genomics, 2020; 21 (1) DOI:
10.1186/s12864-020-06992-2 ==========================================================================

Link to news story: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/09/200908113335.htm

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