Artificial Diets Modulate Infection Rates by Nosema ceranae in Bumblebees

Parasites alter the physiology and behaviour of their hosts. In domestic honey bees, the microsporidia induces energetic stress that impairs the behaviour of foragers, potentially leading to colony collapse. Whether this parasite similarly affects wild pollinators is little understood because of the...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Microorganisms (Basel) 2021-01, Vol.9 (1), p.158
Main Authors: Gómez-Moracho, Tamara, Durand, Tristan, Pasquaretta, Cristian, Heeb, Philipp, Lihoreau, Mathieu
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Artificial diets
Bees
Bombus
Bombus terrestris
Bumblebees
Carbohydrates
Cognition
Diet
Environmental Sciences
Experimental infection
Experiments
Gene expression
High carbohydrate diet
High protein diet
Infections
Insects
Lethal effects
Life Sciences
Low carbohydrate diet
Low protein diet
Microsporidia
Nosema ceranae
Nutrient deficiency
nutrition
Parasites
PCR
Pollinators
Proteins
Protocol
Spores
Sucrose
Survival
survival analyses
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Summary:Parasites alter the physiology and behaviour of their hosts. In domestic honey bees, the microsporidia induces energetic stress that impairs the behaviour of foragers, potentially leading to colony collapse. Whether this parasite similarly affects wild pollinators is little understood because of the low success rates of experimental infection protocols. Here, we present a new approach for infecting bumblebees ( ) with controlled amounts of by briefly exposing individual bumblebees to parasite spores before feeding them with artificial diets. We validated our protocol by testing the effect of two spore dosages and two diets varying in their protein to carbohydrate ratio on the prevalence of the parasite (proportion of PCR-positive bumblebees), the intensity of parasites (spore count in the gut and the faeces), and the survival of bumblebees. Overall, insects fed a low-protein, high-carbohydrate diet showed the highest parasite prevalence (up to 70%) but lived the longest, suggesting that immunity and survival are maximised at different protein to carbohydrate ratios. Spore dosage did not affect parasite infection rate and host survival. The identification of experimental conditions for successfully infecting bumblebees with in the lab will facilitate future investigations of the sub-lethal effects of this parasite on the behaviour and cognition of wild pollinators.
ISSN:2076-2607
2076-2607
DOI:10.3390/microorganisms9010158