Monitoring bee health in European agro-ecosystems using wing morphology and fat bodies

Abstract

Current global change substantially threatens pollinators, which directly impacts the pollination services underpinning the stability, structure and functioning of ecosystems. Amongst these threats, many synergistic drivers, such as habitat destruction and fragmentation, increasing use of agrochemicals, decreasing resource diversity, as well as climate change, are known to affect wild and managed bees. Therefore, reliable indicators for pollinator sensitivity to such threats are needed. Biological traits, such as phenotype (e.g. shape, size and asymmetry) and storage reserves (e.g. fat body size), are important pollinator traits linked to reproductive success, immunity, resilience and foraging efficiency and, therefore, could serve as valuable markers of bee health and pollination service potential. This data paper contains an extensive dataset of wing morphology and fat body content for the European honeybee (Apis mellifera) and the buff-tailed bumblebee (Bombus terrestris) sampled at 128 sites across eight European countries in landscape gradients dominated by two major bee-pollinated crops (apple and oilseed rape), before and after focal crop bloom and potential pesticide exposure. The dataset also includes environmental metrics of each sampling site, namely landscape structure and pesticide use. The data offer the opportunity to test whether variation in the phenotype and fat bodies of bees is structured by environmental factors and drivers of global change. Overall, the dataset provides valuable information to identify which environmental threats predominantly contribute to the modification of these traits.

Using physiology to better support wild bee conservation

“…However, this should be a reasonable target since moving physiological methodologies from model species (e.g. honeybees, bumblebees) to non-model species—and including physiological markers in monitoring programs—are becoming increasingly feasible ( Vanderplanck et al, 2021b ).…”

Pollen as Bee Medicine: Is Prevention Better than Cure?

“…Besides, dead workers and ejected larvae were counted and removed every day during the pollen feeding phase. At the end of the experiment, workers were weighed and their abdominal fat body content was measured as an indicator of immunocompetence (i.e., two workers per microcolony; [ 32 ]) using Ellers’ procedure [ 33 , 34 ]. The brood was dissected for recording the number and mass of individuals within each developmental stage (i.e., eggs, non-isolated larvae, isolated and pre-defecating larvae, isolated and post-defecating larvae).…”

Heather pollen is not necessarily a healthy diet for bumble bees

“…To investigate the impacts of pollen diet and parasite, several parameters in microcolonies were measured (Tasei & Aupinel, 2008), namely resource collection, reproductive success, stress response, and individual health through fat body content (i.e., immunocompetence proxy; Arrese & Soulages, 2010;Rosales, 2017;Vanderplanck et al, 2021) and parasite load measurements.…”