Mechanistic studies of disease resistance in honey bees

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Honey bees are a crucial part of Canadian agriculture, contributing at least $4.6 billion/y: they produce between eighty and ninety thousand tonnes of honey each year and their pollination activities directly support the production of many fruits, nuts and vegetable crops. But the health of honey bees has been declining over the past decade, with Canadian beekeepers losing more than a quarter of their colonies each winter since 2006-07. In Canada, most of the winter losses of bees are attributed to known causes: a parasitic mite, fungal infections and weather. Bees have an innate immune system but it is ineffective against mites and the fungal pathogen has developed a way to avoid it. Thus, beekeepers are forced to use chemicals to control various infectious diseases, including the mite and fungi mentioned, but this is not always effective and is in any case undesirable. Some bees have a secret weapon though, social behaviours that enable them to fight off, or at least live with, pests and pathogens that would otherwise kill them. One of these mechanisms is called hygienic behaviour and our group has previously identified a potential explanation for how this behaviour can happen. It appears as if hygienic bees are better equipped to sense diseased or dying nest-mates and remove them from the colony before the disease spreads. In the work proposed here we will work to understand the molecular processes at work in hygienic behaviour. This will, in turn, feed back into a parallel effort we are involved in that could see the real-world application of these findings into a selective breeding program that aims to strengthen the gene pool of Canadian bees so that they can naturally resist disease without beekeepers having to treat them with synthetic chemicals.