Data from: Interacting stressors matter: diet quality and virus infection in honey bee health

Honey bee population declines have been linked to multiple stressors, including reduced diet diversity and increased exposure to understudied viral pathogens. Despite interest in these factors, few experimental studies explored the interaction between diet diversity and viral infection in honey bees. Here, we used a mixture of laboratory cage and small semi-field nucleus hive experiments to determine how these factors interact. We found that high quality diets (polyfloral pollen and high quality single-source pollen) have the potential to reduce mortality in the face of infection with Israeli acute paralysis virus (IAPV).). There was a significant interaction between diet and virus infection on mortality, even in the presence of high virus titers, suggesting that good diets can help bees tolerate virus infection. Further, we found that extreme stress in the form of pollen starvation in conjunction with IAPV infection increase exiting behavior from small experimental hives. Finally, we showed that higher quality pollen diets have significantly higher iron and calcium content, suggesting micronutrient deficiencies could be an under explored area of bee nutrition.

蜜蜂种群数量下降与多种胁迫因素相关，其中包括饮食多样性降低以及接触尚未被充分研究的病毒病原体的风险上升。尽管学界对上述两类因素已有关注，但目前鲜有实验研究探讨蜜蜂饮食多样性与病毒感染之间的交互作用。本研究结合实验室笼养实验与小型半野外核心蜂箱实验，探究这两类因素的交互效应。研究发现，优质饮食（多源花粉与优质单源花粉）在感染以色列急性麻痹病毒（Israeli acute paralysis virus, IAPV）时，可有效降低蜜蜂死亡率。即使在病毒滴度较高的情况下，饮食与病毒感染对蜜蜂死亡率存在显著的交互作用，这表明优质饮食可帮助蜜蜂耐受病毒感染。进一步研究发现，花粉匮乏结合IAPV感染所构成的极端胁迫，会增加小型实验蜂箱中蜜蜂的出巢行为。最后，本研究证实，优质花粉饮食的铁与钙含量显著更高，这提示微量营养素缺乏可能是蜜蜂营养学中尚未被充分探究的研究方向。