Enhancing Honey Bee Health: Evaluating Pollen Substitute Diets in Field and Cage Experiments | Semantic Scholar (2024)

This study systematically explores various probiotic strains and their impacts on critical parameters, including survival rate, colony strength, honey and royal jelly production, and the immune response of bees, and scrutinizes the factors influencing the gut microbial communities of bees.

A molecular model is proposed to elucidate the transition of long-lived honey bees from diapause to development, induced by nutrition, and carry implications for nutritional research and beekeeping, underscoring the vital role of honey bees in agriculture.

It is demonstrated that a specific pollen substitute diet significantly improves colony performance during early spring, as evidenced by an increase in population, a greater capped brood area, altered colony weight, honey bee weight, and vitellogenin value.

Investigation of artificial diets enriched with either β-alanine, GABA, or proline on consumption, survival, and hemolymph composition in honey bees belonging to two different ages and with different metabolism found a greater susceptibility of young honey bees to enriched diets than older honey bees.

It is suggested that the use of a large population size of beehives can reduce the infestation rate and the adaptation of mite/antibacterial immune competence of honey bees to different life stages and the breeding stock of bees for hygienic behaviors resisting mite infestations.

The results showed that the pollen with a higher essential amino acid content had advantages in laying time, the number of eggs laid, larval ejection, and the time of first worker emergence, as well as in the time the colony took to reach ten workers.

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