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Q&A ViewAttendees 12

Plant-Insect Ecosystems

Section Symposium

Pollinator Nutritional Research: From Collecting and Characterizing Floral Resource Provisions to the Inference of Ecological and Evolutionary Consequences

Food as medicine: Assessing the specificity, trade-offs, and mechanisms of sunflower pollen's medicinal effect in bumble bees

Wednesday, November 3, 2021
1:35 PM – 1:55 PM MT
Location: Colorado Convention Center, Meeting Room 108-110
In-Person
An organism’s diet can profoundly influence health, including direct and indirect effects on resistance to parasite infection. Recent work has found that sunflower pollen reduces infection by a common gut parasite, Crithidia bombi, in bumble bees, Bombus impatiens, but we do not know the generality of these effects across bee host species, potential performance trade-offs, or the underlying mechanism(s). We assessed the effect of sunflower pollen on parasite infection in different castes and bumble bee species, performance in B. impatiens microcolonies, and the individual immunity. We found that sunflower pollen reduced Crithidia infection in B. impatiens workers and queens, but did not affect infection levels in workers of three other species or B. impatiens males. In our microcolony study, we found that 50% sunflower pollen reduced C. bombi infection compared to a wildflower pollen mix, but also reduced reproduction although not worker survival. In our immune function study, we measured constitutive immunity in naïve bees and induced immunity in bacterially challenged bees. The activity of phenoloxidase, an enzyme in the melanization cascade, and humoral antibacterial activity were not affected by feeding on sunflower pollen nor Crithidia infection. Our findings demonstrate that the medicinal effect of sunflower pollen differs across bumble bee host species, carries a reproductive cost, and does not affect commonly assayed components of bee immunity. We conclude that sunflower pollen is consistently effective in reducing Crithidia infections in wild and commercial B. impatiens/em>, but could hinder colony growth if few other resources are available.