Honeybees have been found to create a special ‘baby food’ for their larvae, providing them with a better-balanced diet. According to new research, honeybees can regulate their feeding to avoid overconsuming certain essential nutrients.
Nutritional Skill
The study, led by Oxford University, reveals that bees have a previously unknown nutritional skill: the ability to adjust how much they eat in response to the balance of essential amino acids in their food. This helps them avoid the potentially toxic effects of overconsuming certain amino acids when pollen provides a poor nutritional match for their needs.
Researchers compared the essential amino acid profiles of honeybee tissues with that of pollen from 99 U.K. flowering plant species across 26 plant families. They found that most pollen sources tested were a poor match for the essential amino acid profile of bee tissues.
Bees fed diets that more closely matched their own tissue composition — rather than pollen — ate more, gained more weight, and consumed a more protein-rich balance of food. The researchers suspected that the response was linked to histidine, an essential amino acid that bees need only in small amounts.
Implications for Farmers and Gardeners
The findings have important implications for farmers, landowners, conservationists, and gardeners seeking to support pollinators. The researchers suggest that pollinator-friendly planting schemes should look beyond the number of flowers provided and consider the nutritional quality and diversity of pollen sources.
A varied diet may be essential for bees to obtain the right balance of nutrients. Many wild bees, including bumblebees and solitary bees, feed pollen directly to their young, and if their environment contains only a limited range of flowering plants, they may struggle to obtain the right balance of essential amino acids for themselves and their developing larvae.
Original reporting: KTBS 3 (Shreveport) — read the source article.
