Study Shows Fungus Attacks Honeybee Digestive Tract
May 2, 2014
From: South Dakota Public Broadcasting
By Amy Varland
Pollinators, like honeybees, face a barrage of obstacles every day while just trying to do their jobs – pollenating Earth’s plants and perpetuating their colonies. Keeping the queen bee happy, the hive clean, and the young fed while dodging stressors like pesticides and parasites is no easy task.
Holly Holt is a graduate student in the Etymology Department at Penn State. Holt says the numbers of pollinators, like honeybees, are declining world-wide. She says stressors including pesticides, aggressive agricultural practices, parasites, and pathogens are constant threats that can cause habitat fragmentation in pollinator populations here in South Dakota and across the globe.
Holt says she is studying two honeybee stressors in particular – microsporidian fungal pathogens – and the effects they have on the bee’s behavior, physiology, and gene expression.
“Nosema apis and nosema ceranae are two species of microsporidia that attack honey bees. Microsporidia employ a dual-life-stage strategy – they persist in the environment as these really hard durable spores and they wait to be eaten by honeybees. So when honeybees eat nosema spores from contaminated food supplies those spores travel to the digestive tract of the bee until they reach a portion of the tract called the mid-gut,” says Holt.
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