U of I study hopes to shed light on strengthening bees

A unique study investigating honeybee resilience has revealed some interesting findings.

Doctoral student Edward Hsieh and Professor Adam Dolezal from the University of Illinois looked at how the combination of nutritional stress, viral infections and exposure to pesticides influence honeybee survival. No other studies have examined all three stressors together. What they found may help their populations for years to come.

They found that honeybees become more resilient to threats if they have good nutrition.

“People have been studying honeybees for hundreds of years, and yet there are still so many unanswered, seemingly like really basic questions,” Hsieh said.

That’s why grad student Edward Hsieh is trying to fill in the holes.

“After I had graduated from my undergraduate program, I was working as a technician in a lab that Dr. Dolezal was also working in,” said Hsieh. “So that had started my trajectory of working with honeybees in the first place.”

While trying to understand more about how honeybee’s nutrition, exposure to pesticides and viruses all interact, Hsieh and Dolezal learned that when they had poor nutrition and encountered pesticides, they were very quickly taken out by illness. But when you change the formula, you get a surprising result.

“If bees were exposed to a higher what we think of as a higher nutritional diet, the pesticide exposure actually made them survive better against the disease,” Dolezal said. “Which is a really surprising, non-intuitive finding.”

To find this out, the scientists had exposed honeybees to different dietary viral and chemical treatments in a lab setting.

They found that bees on a natural diet, who were exposed to a bee virus still had a high chance of death. But, less bees on a natural diet died when exposed to chemicals.

These results may have been unexpected, but they line up with one beekeepers experience.

“That’s kind of always been my philosophy is lots of different good pollen sources,” beekeeper Rachel Coventry said. “So, they have a range of forage operations from the very beginning of spring to the very end of fall.”

Rachel Coventry from Curtis Orchard in Champaign says she’s had good success keeping her bees alive with this strategy. And with this study, she feels confident in moving forward.

“I found it a really encouraging study to find that because there’s no way you’re going to avoid all pesticides,” Coventry said. “Especially being surrounded by all these row crops in the area.”

Coventry is not the only one.

“Investigating this further has been really rewarding for me,” Hsieh said. “I just think it’s great to be able to contribute further towards the improvement of honeybee health and unraveling all these various mysteries.”

Overall, one takeaway from the research is that bees are better equipped to survive pesticides and chemicals if they have good nutrition. But, researchers say chemicals do still make life worse for the honeybees.

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