Causes and consequences of variation in the nutrition and endemic
      microflora of food stores in managed honey bees (Apis mellifera L.)
Creators: name: Donkersley, Philip William
Publisher: name: Lancaster University
Year: 2014

description: Honey bees are pollinators, accounting for around 90% of commercial
      
      pollination of animal-pollinated plants and approximately 35% of global
      food
      
      production. Global populations of honey bees have declined significantly
      recently
      
      with heavy losses attributed to Colony Collapse Disorder, pesticides,
      parasites and
      
      pathogens. One of the factors that may be contributing to an increase in
      susceptibility
      
      to these stresses is the quality of food available in a hive. This thesis
      focuses on the
      
      interactions between honey bee nutrition, microbial communities and
      fitness.
      
      In Chapter 2 the nutritional composition of bee bread (pollen stored
      inside
      
      hives) was studied. The composition in terms of protein and reducing sugar
      was found
      
      to vary both spatially and temporally; lipid and starch content was found
      to vary
      
      temporally through the season. The spatial trends in protein content were
      found to be
      
      associated with changes in landscape composition, as estimated by the
      Countryside
      
      Survey database. The implications for these findings are that certain
      landscape types
      
      may produce higher quality diets for honey bees.
      
      In Chapter 3, the link between nutritional composition of bee bread and
      the
      
      species of plant that comprise it was investigated. Previous research
      indicates that
      
      pollens vary in their nutritional content and using molecular tools, we
      investigated the
      
      impact of complex plant communities in this system. The number of plant
      species in
      
      bee bread was positively correlated with increasing protein levels, and
      specifically
      
      certain individual plant species were found to be driving this pattern.
      These results
      
      indicate that a more diverse diet of plants will benefit honey bees by
      increasing their
      
      dietary protein intake.
      
      The conversion of pollen to bee bread requires the activity of certain
      
      microorganisms. In chapter 4, we again used molecular tools to study the
      microbial community found associated with bee bread. We found a community
      that was not
      
      significantly different between hives located in different areas, but
      which varied
      
      significantly in is composition through the beekeeping season. This
      suggests that the
      
      environment does not determine the bacterial communities in honey bee
      hives; rather
      
      it is being determined by seasonal changes.
      
      Finally, in chapter 5 the relationship between the nutritional composition
      of
      
      bee bread and the immunocompetence of larval and adult honey bees was
      examined.
      
      The results showed that dietary protein and carbohydrate is significantly
      correlated
      
      with the overall fitness of a hive in terms of expression a constituent
      immune
      
      response. The link between landscape composition and nutrition established
      in chapter
      
      2 was used to predict honey bee nutrition across the UK, and then was used
      to predict
      
      immune response for all UK bees. These predictions were comparable to
      honey bee
      
      disease records maintained by UK government.
      
      This thesis provides a detailed examination of the effects of landscape
      
      composition on honey bee nutrition and immunity. The results presented
      here have
      
      implications for understanding spatial patterns in bee fitness and bee
      disease
      
      epidemiology.