Pollen as Bee Medicine: Is Prevention Better than Cure?

To face environmental stressors such as infection, animals may display behavioural plasticity to improve their physiological status through ingestion of specific food. In bees, the significance of medicating pollen may be limited by their ability to exploit it. Until now, studies have focused on the...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Biology (Basel, Switzerland) Switzerland), 2023-03, Vol.12 (4), p.497
Main Authors: Vanderplanck, Maryse, Marin, Lucie, Michez, Denis, Gekière, Antoine
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Agricultural economics
Bees
Breeding success
Bumblebees
Costs
Diet
Disease transmission
Drug self-administration
environmental stressors
Experiments
Food
Infection
Life Sciences
Medical research
Medicine, Experimental
Nectar
Organisms
Parasites
Parasitic diseases
Pathogens
Physiology
Pollen
Prevention
prophylaxis
Reproductive fitness
resistance
Self-medication
therapy
tolerance
Virulence
Virulence (Microbiology)
Workers
Workers (insect caste)
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:To face environmental stressors such as infection, animals may display behavioural plasticity to improve their physiological status through ingestion of specific food. In bees, the significance of medicating pollen may be limited by their ability to exploit it. Until now, studies have focused on the medicinal effects of pollen and nectar after forced-feeding experiments, overlooking spontaneous intake. Here, we explored the medicinal effects of different pollen on workers infected by the gut parasite . First, we used a forced-feeding experimental design allowing for the distinction between prophylactic and therapeutic effects of pollen, considering host tolerance and resistance. Then, we assessed whether bumble bees favoured medicating resources when infected to demonstrate potential self-medicative behaviour. We found that infected bumble bees had a lower fitness but higher resistance when forced to consume sunflower or heather pollen, and that infection dynamics was more gradual in therapeutic treatments. When given the choice between resources, infected workers did not target medicating pollen, nor did they consume more medicating pollen than uninfected ones. These results emphasize that the access to medicating resources could impede parasite dynamics, but that the cost-benefit trade-off could be detrimental when fitness is highly reduced.
ISSN:2079-7737
2079-7737
DOI:10.3390/biology12040497