Abstract
As social insects, honey bees (Apis mellifera) rely on the coordinated performance of various behaviors to ensure that the needs of the colony are met. One of the most critical of these behaviors is the feeding and care of egg laying honey bee queens by non-fecund female worker attendants. These behaviors are crucial to honey bee reproduction and are known to be elicited by the queen’s pheromone blend. The degree to which workers respond to this blend can vary depending on their physiological status, but little is known regarding the impacts of developmental exposure to agrochemicals on this behavior. This work investigated how exposing workers during larval development to chronic sublethal doses of insect growth disruptors affected their development time, weight, longevity, and queen pheromone responsiveness as adult worker honey bees. Exposure to the juvenile hormone analog pyriproxyfen consistently shortened the duration of pupation, and pyriproxyfen and diflubenzuron inconsistently reduced the survivorship of adult bees. Finally, pyriproxyfen and methoxyfenozide treated bees were found to be less responsive to queen pheromone relative to other treatment groups. Here, we describe these results and discuss their possible physiological underpinnings as well as their potential impacts on honey bee reproduction and colony performance.
Highlights
Managed honey bees (Apis mellifera) are crucial agricultural pollinators that improve food security for growing global populations (Southwick and Southwick, 1992; Aizen et al, 2008; Calderone, 2012), and the transportation of large numbers of pollinators into agricultural fields is simplified by the social nature of honey bees, where thousands of worker bees live together in a self-contained unit (Winston, 1987)
We focus on three insect growth disruptors (IGDs) known to be applied in flowering almond orchards while bees are foraging: the juvenile hormone (JH) analog pyriproxyfen, the ecdysone agonist methoxyfenozide, and the chitin synthesis inhibitor diflubenzuron (CalPIP Home - California Pesticide Information Portal)
Separate linear mixed effects models (LMM) were constructed to assess treatment dependent differences in pupal development time and weight at adult eclosion with replicate and source colony treated as random effects
Summary
Managed honey bees (Apis mellifera) are crucial agricultural pollinators that improve food security for growing global populations (Southwick and Southwick, 1992; Aizen et al, 2008; Calderone, 2012), and the transportation of large numbers of pollinators into agricultural fields is simplified by the social nature of honey bees, where thousands of worker bees live together in a self-contained unit (Winston, 1987) This communal living arrangement relies upon a complex social structure wherein tasks such as reproduction, rearing offspring, and gathering food are delegated by caste and by age (Hölldobler and Wilson, 2009). Workers that are less responsive to QP may perform other tasks such as foraging (Pham-Delègue et al, 1993) These divisions of labor create a strong codependence between hive members, and the continued functioning of a colony is reliant on the balanced performance of these behaviors (Oster and Wilson, 1978). Various stressors can shift the optimal balance of these divisions, resulting in a disruption to the normal processes required to sustain colony activities like reproduction (Perry et al, 2015; Booton et al, 2017; Bordier et al, 2017), which may eventually lead to colony loss
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