Measuring and understanding health stressors in honey bees

蜜蜂可以说是农作物最重要的传粉者：它们提供可靠的授粉服务，提高了粮食生产的效率，为加拿大和美国的经济贡献了高达395亿美元。然而，对于养蜂人来说，维持健康、多产的蜂群变得越来越困难，成本也越来越高，越冬损失一直高得不可持续。调查结果显示，养蜂人认为“可怜的蜂王”是蜂群死亡的主要原因之一，但人们对蜂王质量下降的原因知之甚少。每个蜂群由一只蜂王领导，作为唯一的产蛋者和蜂群中所有蜜蜂的母亲，任何影响她健康的因素都会影响整个蜂箱。不幸的是，大约一半的蜂王在前往殖民地的头六个月内需要更换，尽管它们的潜在寿命超过三年，这相当于潜在生产力的巨大损失。越来越多的证据表明，蜂王很容易受到病毒和真菌的感染，这可能会对它们的繁殖力造成严重后果，从而影响蜂群的生产力。在我们的研究中，我们计划调查病原体感染如何改变蜂王的生理，以及它们如何影响蜂王的生育能力。我们将结合详细的实验室试验和现实的、孤立的现场试验来确定感染的短期和长期影响，并结合我们世界领先的内部蛋白质组学技术来发现影响生殖的致病机制。女王的生育能力不仅受其产卵能力的影响，还受其受精能力的影响。一位年轻的女王进行了几次婚礼飞行，并将配偶的精子储存在一个专门的器官--受精囊中，她用这个器官让卵子受精，度过余生。女王保持精子存活的能力带来了经济后果：贫穷的女王的精囊中死亡精子的比例高于健康的女王，但我们对导致精子死亡的原因知之甚少。我们的目标是开发一种人工精子存储系统，以便于研究精子存活率和寿命的分子机制。一旦我们建立了这个系统，我们将使用它来调整酶活性和抑制剂，添加代谢物，或提取蛋白质，然后观察对精子质量的影响。我们的目标将部分通过调查哪些蛋白质与其他群居昆虫物种的精子活力有关，以及部分通过观察病原体感染扰乱哪些过程来获得信息。我们的愿景是通过提高蜂王的质量，进而提高蜂群的生产力和健康来支持养蜂业。如果我们能够理解蜂王过早失败的原因，我们就可以建立最佳的管理实践，帮助养蜂人减轻这些风险，并朝着我们维持和确保蜜蜂健康的长期目标前进。

Honey bees are arguably the most significant pollinators of agricultural crops: They provide reliable pollination services that increase the efficiency of food production, contributing up to $39.5 billion to the Canadian and U.S. economies. However, it is becoming more difficult and costly for beekeepers to maintain healthy, productive colonies, and overwintering losses have been unsustainably high. Survey results show that beekeepers cite `poor queens' as one of the primary causes of colony mortality, yet little is known about what is causing this decline in queen quality. Each colony is headed by a single queen, and as the sole egg-layer and mother to all the bees in her colony, any factor impacting her health also affects the entire hive. Unfortunately, about half of queens need to be replaced within their first six months of heading a colony, despite having potential lifespans upwards of three years, which equates to a huge loss of potential productivity. Evidence is mounting that queens are vulnerable to viral and fungal infections, which could have serious consequences for their fertility and therefore colony productivity. In our research, we plan to investigate how pathogenic infections alter queen physiology and how they may compromise queen fertility. We will use a combination of detailed laboratory trials and realistic, isolated field trials to determine short- and long-term effects of infection, coupled with our world-leading, in-house proteomics technology to discover mechanisms of pathogenicity that impact reproduction. Queen fertility is affected not only by her ability to produce eggs, but also her capacity to fertilize them. A young queen embarks on several nuptial flights and stores her mates' sperm in a specialized organ, the spermatheca, which she uses to fertilize eggs for the rest of her life. The queen's ability to keep sperm alive has economic consequences: Poor queens have a higher proportion of dead sperm within their spermatheca than healthy queens, but we have a poor understanding of what causes this sperm death. We aim to develop an artificial sperm storage system to facilitate studying molecular mechanisms underlying sperm viability and longevity. Once we have established this system, we will use it to, for example, adjust enzyme activities with inhibitors, add metabolites, or pull out proteins, then observe effects on sperm quality. Our targets will be informed in part by investigating what proteins are linked to sperm viability in other social insect species, and in part by observing what processes are disrupted by pathogenic infections. Our vision is to bolster the beekeeping industry by improving queen quality and, by extension, the productivity and health of their colonies. If we can understand why queens are failing prematurely, we can establish best management practices to help beekeepers mitigate those risks, and advance toward our long-term objective of sustaining and securing honey bee health.