Abstract
Queen loss or failure is an important cause of honey bee colony loss. A functional queen is essential to a colony, and the queen is predicted to be well protected by worker bees and other mechanisms of social immunity. Nevertheless, several honey bee pathogens (including viruses) can infect queens. Here, we report a series of experiments to test how virus infection influences queen–worker interactions and the consequences for virus transmission. We used Israeli acute paralysis virus (IAPV) as an experimental pathogen because it is relevant to bee health but is not omnipresent. Queens were observed spending 50% of their time with healthy workers, 32% with infected workers, and 18% without interaction. However, the overall bias toward healthy workers was not statistically significant, and there was considerable individual to individual variability. We found that physical contact between infected workers and queens leads to high queen infection in some cases, suggesting that IAPV infections also spread through close bodily contact. Across experiments, queens exhibited lower IAPV titers than surrounding workers. Thus, our results indicate that honey bee queens are better protected by individual and social immunity, but this protection is insufficient to prevent IAPV infections completely.
Highlights
The European honey bee, Apis mellifera, lives in colonies containing several thousand, closely related workers typically derived from a single queen
To address how honey bee queens may be protected from Israeli acute paralysis virus (IAPV), and to further understand social immunity, we studied the behavioral interactions between queens and workers quantified the resulting IAPV transmission from experimentally infected workers to non-infected queens
All five control queens remained absent of IAPV, even though workers in three of the control cages developed a low level IAPV infection with IAPV titers ranging from 1.09 × 102 to 2.78 × 102 copies/μL (Figure 1)
Summary
The European honey bee, Apis mellifera, lives in colonies containing several thousand, closely related workers typically derived from a single queen. The queen’s pheromones attract a retinue of worker bees to attend the queen by antennating, grooming, and feeding her, which includes close physical contact and liquid food transfer via trophallaxis [3,4,5]. These retinue behaviors facilitate the spread of the queen pheromones to the rest of the colony, but the worker–queen interactions are crucial for maintaining queen health and (presumably) responsible for facilitating the exceptional longevity of the queen [6,7,8]. Since retinue workers are typically young with little contact to the outside world, they may provide a social barrier to protect the queen and lower her exposure to infectious
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