Study finds honeybees need a balanced diet, too
Study finds honeybees need a balanced diet, too
Turns out it’s not just humans who need to watch what they eat.
A new study from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem has revealed that a balanced diet is crucial for the health and task performance of honeybees, which play a key role in pollination around the world.
The research, conducted by Prof. Sharoni Shafir and his team at the Robert H. Smith Faculty of Agriculture, Food and Environment, sheds light on how honeybees balance their nutritional intake to maintain homeostasis and enhance fitness.
The study’s findings indicate that an unbalanced diet with a high omega-6 to omega-3 ratio (5:1) significantly impairs the bees’ ability to nurse larvae. Bees fed such a diet showed delays in the onset of nursing behavior, reduced frequency of nursing visits, and altered attention to larvae of different ages.
In other words, if bee ladies don’t balance out their omega 6s with omega 3s, the baby bees get less attention, which ends up lowering hive health in the long run.
To investigate these effects, researchers fed one-day-old adult worker bees either a balanced or unbalanced diet for seven days. The bees were then released into a common-garden hive, tagged with barcodes and filmed continuously for six days.
Analysis revealed that bees on the unbalanced diet exhibited delayed and less efficient nursing behavior, particularly in distinguishing between three-day-old and four-day-old larvae.
