A new design of bee cage for laboratory experiments: nutritional assessment of supplemental diets in honey bees (Apis mellifera)

Abstract

We designed a cage that can maintain adult bees for 21 days with about 90% survival rate, in addition to facilitating the changing of sucrose syrup and beebread, and collection of live and dead bees without disturbing or releasing bees. The consumption rates of bee pollen diet and sucrose syrup for groups of 50–200 honey bees were recorded for 21 days after emergence. The bees consumed the bee pollen diet mainly at the age of 1–9 days. Regular consumption of sucrose syrup was observed among all bee groups throughout the 21 days. Furthermore, the nutritional responses of nurse bees—specifically, the expressions of major royal jelly protein 1 (mrjp1) in the head and vitellogenin (vg) in the abdomen—upon the provision of five single-supplemental diets were evaluated. We aimed to improve the usability of bee cages by elucidating the food consumption of bees and the relationship between nutritional gene expression and the ingestion of each single-protein diet.