Pollen resources and trophic niche breadth of Apis mellifera and Melipona obscurior (Hymenoptera, Apidae) in a subtropical climate in the Atlantic rain forest of southern Brazil

Hilgert-Moreira, Suzane Both; Nascher, Carla Andrea; Callegari-Jacques, Sídia M.; Blochtein, Betina

doi:10.1007/s13592-013-0234-5

Cited by 28 publications

(22 citation statements)

References 37 publications

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“…For example, colonies are transported for honey production to forage on Eucalyptus, which is an attractive nectar source (63). Cultivated Eucalyptus forests have surpassed 20 million hectares worldwide (64), and it is a dominant pollen source for bees, also where it is an exotic plant (65). However, its pollen is extremely rich in LA and poor in ALA, with an omega-6:3 ratio ranging between 5 and 26 (66) ( Table 1 and Table S5).…”

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confidence: 99%

Omega-3 deficiency impairs honey bee learning

Arien

Dag

Zarchin

et al. 2015

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

147

123

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Deficiency in essential omega-3 polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFAs), particularly the long-chain form of docosahexaenoic acid (DHA), has been linked to health problems in mammals, including many mental disorders and reduced cognitive performance. Insects have very low long-chain PUFA concentrations, and the effect of omega-3 deficiency on cognition in insects has not been studied. We show a low omega-6:3 ratio of pollen collected by honey bee colonies in heterogenous landscapes and in many hand-collected pollens that we analyzed. We identified Eucalyptus as an important bee-forage plant particularly poor in omega-3 and high in the omega-6:3 ratio. We tested the effect of dietary omega-3 deficiency on olfactory and tactile associative learning of the economically highly valued honey bee. Bees fed either of two omega-3-poor diets, or Eucalyptus pollen, showed greatly reduced learning abilities in conditioned proboscis-extension assays compared with those fed omega-3-rich diets, or omega-3-rich pollen mixture. The effect on performance was not due to reduced sucrose sensitivity. Omega-3 deficiency also led to smaller hypopharyngeal glands. Bee brains contained high omega-3 concentrations, which were only slightly affected by diet, suggesting additional peripheral effects on learning. The shift from a low to high omega-6:3 ratio in the Western human diet is deemed a primary cause of many diseases and reduced mental health. A similar shift seems to be occurring in bee forage, possibly an important factor in colony declines. Our study shows the detrimental effect on cognitive performance of omega-3 deficiency in a nonmammal.fatty acids | alpha-linolenic acid | Apis mellifera | associative conditioning | proboscis extension response

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mentioning

confidence: 99%

Omega-3 deficiency impairs honey bee learning

Arien

Dag

Zarchin

et al. 2015

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

147

123

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“…In most pollination systems, a given pollinator often visits a wide variety of flower species and Apis mellifera is one of the polylectic bee species (Aronne et al 2012;Shimizu et al 2014;Hilgert-Moreira et al 2014). The honey bees' lissome segmented glossal structures can increase the flexibility of the glossa, as the movements of multi-segmented glossa exhibit a higher degree of freedom and allow them for more adequate responses to flower corollas of varying width and depth.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Feeding Kinematics and Nectar Intake of the Honey Bee Tongue

Zhu

Liu

et al. 2016

J Insect Behav

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Most flower-visiting insects employ highly-evolved organs to feed themselves rapidly and efficiently on the floral nectar. A honey bee drives its segmented tongue (glossa) covered by dense hairs reciprocatingly to load nectar. A high-speed camera system ameliorated by a microscope revealed morphological changes in glossal surfaces during live honey bees' nectar dipping and surface configurations through the stretching of postmortem honey bees' glossae. Both the in vivo and postmortem observations reveal that shortening and lengthening of the glossal segments perform high concordance with the erection of glossal hairs, which aids in developing deformable gaps between rows of glossal hairs during nectar trapping. A model was proposed to evaluate the nectar-intake volume considering the experimentally-measured average erection angle and tongue elongation length during nectar feeding. The theoretical results fit the experimental data well and disclose that these two factors contribute to an augmentation of nectar-intake observably. We also theoretically present that the extendible and deformable glossae have advantages for the polylectic feeding behavior.

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“…Relative to bees that cannot sonicate, sonicating bees should generally be able to collect pollen from a wider variety of plant species. Further, the pollen of poricidal angiosperm species often dominates the diet of bee species capable of sonicating, sometimes constituting greater than three-quarters of their pollen diet (e.g., Camillo and Garofalo 1989;Ramalho et al 1990;Serra et al 2012;Hilgert-Moreira et al 2013;Villanueva Gutierrez et al 2013).…”

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confidence: 99%

The evolution of floral sonication, a pollen foraging behavior used by bees (Anthophila)

2018

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Over 22,000 species of biotically pollinated flowering plants, including some major agricultural crops, depend primarily on bees capable of floral sonication for pollination services. The ability to sonicate (“buzz”) flowers is widespread in bees but not ubiquitous. Despite the prevalence of this pollinator behavior and its importance to natural and agricultural systems, the evolutionary history of floral sonication in bees has not been previously studied. Here, we reconstruct the evolutionary history of floral sonication in bees by generating a time‐calibrated phylogeny and reconstructing ancestral states for this pollen extraction behavior. We also test the hypothesis that the ability to sonicate flowers and thereby efficiently access pollen from a diverse assemblage of plant species, led to increased diversification among sonicating bee taxa. We find that floral sonication evolved on average 45 times within bees, possibly first during the Early Cretaceous (100–145 million years ago) in the common ancestor of bees. We find that sonicating lineages are significantly more species rich than nonsonicating sister lineages when comparing sister clades, but a probabilistic structured rate permutation on phylogenies approach failed to support the hypothesis that floral sonication is a key driver of bee diversification. This study provides the evolutionary framework needed to further study how floral sonication by bees may have facilitated the spread and common evolution of angiosperm species with poricidal floral morphology.

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Pollen resources and trophic niche breadth of Apis mellifera and Melipona obscurior (Hymenoptera, Apidae) in a subtropical climate in the Atlantic rain forest of southern Brazil

Cited by 28 publications

References 37 publications

Omega-3 deficiency impairs honey bee learning

Omega-3 deficiency impairs honey bee learning

Feeding Kinematics and Nectar Intake of the Honey Bee Tongue

The evolution of floral sonication, a pollen foraging behavior used by bees (Anthophila)

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