Honey bee nutritional health depends on nectar and pollen, which provide the main source of carbohydrates, proteins and lipids to individual bees. During malnutrition, insect metabolism accesses fat body reserves. However, this process in bees and its repercussions at the colony level are poorly understood. Using untargeted lipidomics and gene expression analysis, we examined the effects of different feeding treatments (starvation, sugar feeding and sugar + pollen feeding) on bees and correlated them with colony health indicators. We found that nutritional stress led to an increase in unsaturated triacylglycerols and diacylglycerols, as well as a decrease in free fatty acids in the bee fat body. Here, we hypothesise that stored lipids are made available through a process where unsaturations change lipid's structure. Increased gene expression of three lipid desaturases in response to malnutrition supports this hypothesis, as these desaturases may be involved in releasing fatty acyl chains for lipolysis. Although nutritional stress was evident in starving and sugar‐fed bees at the colony and physiological level, only starved colonies presented long‐term effects in honey production.
Honey bee nutritional health depends on nectar and pollen, which provide the main source of carbohydrate, protein, and lipids to individual bees. During malnutrition the insect metabolism accesses fat body reserves, this process however, is poorly understood, as well as its repercussions at a colony level. Using untargeted lipidomic analysis we examined the effects of different nutritional conditions during larval development followed by recovery and colony productivity. Nutritional stress led to an increase of unsaturation in triacylglycerols and diacylglycerols, as well as a decrease in free fatty acids. Suggesting the bees' metabolism triggers a process that makes lipid reserves rapidly accessible by changing their structure and allowing their mobilization. We also identified the specific lipid desaturase genes in honey bees that are induced in response to starvation. Even though nutritional stress was evident in starving and sugar-fed bees at a colony and physiological level, we found that only starved hives presented long-term effects as honey production.
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