Institute of Bee Health, Vetsuisse Faculty, University of Bern, Bern, Switzerland.
Faculty of Science, Energy and Environment, King Mongkut's University of Technology North Bangkok, Rayong, Thailand.
PLoS One. 2024 Aug 16;19(8):e0308950. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0308950. eCollection 2024.
Eusocial insects, such as stingless bees (Meliponini), depend on division of labour, overlapping generations, and collaborative brood care to ensure the functionality and success of their colony. Female workers transition through a range of age-specific tasks during their lifespan (i.e., age-polyethism) and play a central role in the success of a colony. These age-specific tasks (e.g., brood care or foraging) often closely coincide with key physiological changes necessary to ensure optimal performance. However, our understanding of how nutrition, age, and polyethism may affect the development of such physiological traits in stingless bees remains limited. Here we show that pollen consumption and age-polyethism govern hypopharyngeal gland (HPG) acini size and protein content in Tetragonula pagdeni. By conducting a controlled laboratory experiment we monitored the effect of pollen consumption on worker bee survival as well as assessed how a pollen diet and age affected their HPG acini width and protein content. Further, we sampled nurses and foragers from field colonies to measure the effect of age-polyethism on HPG acini width. We found that pollen consumption enhanced survival and led to increased HPG acini width and protein content and that HPG acini were as expected largest in nurse bees. Our findings highlight the beneficial effects of an adequate diet for physiological development and health in stingless bees and reveal that age-polyethism is the key factor governing HPG size in worker bees. As HPGs are imperative for collaborative brood care-an essential component of eusociality-the data provide a foundation for future studies to investigate the impact of potential environmental stressors on a critical physiological trait in stingless bees which may serve as a proxy to understand the effects at the colony level.
社会性昆虫，如无刺蜜蜂（Meliponini），依赖分工、世代重叠和协作的育雏护理，以确保其群体的功能和成功。雌性工蜂在其生命周期中经历一系列特定年龄的任务（即年龄多态性），并在群体的成功中发挥核心作用。这些特定年龄的任务（例如，育雏护理或觅食）通常与确保最佳表现所需的关键生理变化密切相关。然而，我们对营养、年龄和多态性如何影响无刺蜜蜂这些生理特征的发展的理解仍然有限。在这里，我们表明花粉消耗和年龄多态性决定了 Tetragonula pagdeni 的下咽腺（HPG）腺泡的大小和蛋白质含量。通过进行受控的实验室实验，我们监测了花粉消耗对工蜂生存的影响，并评估了花粉饮食和年龄如何影响它们的 HPG 腺泡宽度和蛋白质含量。此外，我们从野外群体中采样了护士和觅食者，以测量年龄多态性对 HPG 腺泡宽度的影响。我们发现，花粉消耗增强了生存能力，并导致 HPG 腺泡宽度和蛋白质含量增加，而 HPG 腺泡在护士蜜蜂中预期最大。我们的研究结果强调了适当饮食对无刺蜜蜂生理发育和健康的有益影响，并揭示了年龄多态性是决定工蜂 HPG 大小的关键因素。由于 HPG 对于协作育雏护理至关重要——这是社会性的一个基本组成部分——这些数据为未来的研究提供了基础，以研究潜在环境胁迫因素对无刺蜜蜂关键生理特征的影响，这可能作为了解群体层面影响的一个代理。
