Measuring and understanding health stressors in honey bees

蜜蜂可以说是农作物最重要的授粉者：它们提供可靠的授粉服务，提高粮食生产效率，为加拿大和美国经济贡献高达395亿美元。然而，养蜂人维持健康、多产的蜂群变得越来越困难和昂贵，越冬损失已经高得不可持续。调查结果表明，养蜂人认为“蜂王不好”是蜂群死亡的主要原因之一，但对导致蜂王质量下降的原因知之甚少。 每个蜂群由一个蜂王领导，作为唯一的产卵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巢。不幸的是，大约一半的蚁后需要在它们领导一个殖民地的头六个月内被替换，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，蚁后很容易受到病毒和真菌感染，这可能会对它们的生育能力和群体生产力产生严重后果。在我们的研究中，我们计划调查病原性感染如何改变女王生理学以及它们如何影响女王生育能力。我们将使用详细的实验室试验和现实的隔离现场试验相结合，以确定感染的短期和长期影响，再加上我们世界领先的内部蛋白质组学技术，以发现影响生殖的致病机制。女王的生育能力不仅受到她产生卵子的能力的影响，而且还受到她使卵子受精的能力的影响。一只年轻的蚁后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中，受精囊，她用它来使卵子受精，直到她的余生。女王保持精子存活的能力具有经济后果：贫穷的女王比健康的女王受精囊内死亡精子的比例更高，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储存系统，以促进研究精子活力和寿命的分子机制。一旦我们建立了这个系统，我们将用它来，例如，用抑制剂调节酶活性，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社会昆虫物种的精子活力有关，部分通过观察病原性感染破坏了哪些过程。我们的愿景是通过提高蜂王质量，进而提高蜂群的生产力和健康，来支持养蜂业。如果我们能够理解为什么蜂王过早地失败，我们就可以建立最佳管理实践来帮助养蜂人减轻这些风险，并朝着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.