Early-life experience affects honey bee aggression and resilience to immune challenge

An interesting read:

Early-life experience affects honey bee aggression and resilience to immune challenge
(nature.com -Scientific Reports)

http://www.nature.com/srep/2015/1510...srep15572.html

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Early-life social experiences cause lasting changes in behavior and health for a variety of animals including humans, but it is not well understood how social information ‘‘gets under the skin’’ resulting in these effects. Adult honey bees (Apis mellifera) exhibit socially coordinated collective nest defense, providing a model for social modulation of aggressive behavior. Here we report for the first time that a honey bee’s early-life social environment has lasting effects on individual aggression: bees that experienced high-aggression environments during pre-adult stages showed increased aggression when they reached adulthood relative to siblings that experienced low-aggression environments, even though all bees were kept in a common environment during adulthood. Unlike other animals including humans however, high-aggression honey bees were more, rather than less, resilient to immune challenge, assessed as neonicotinoid pesticide susceptibility. Moreover, aggression was negatively correlated with ectoparasitic mite presence. In honey bees, early-life social experience has broad effects, but increased aggression is decoupled from negative health outcomes. Because honey bees and humans share aspects of their physiological response to aggressive social encounters, our findings represent a step towards identifying ways to improve individual resiliency. Pre-adult social experience may be crucial to the health of the ecologically threatened honey bee.

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Gavin might like to tidy up the title of this thread. It's always best to keep things smart and tidy.

Done.

Interesting paper - even though I choke on the unjustifiable extrapolations and misunderstandings:

'Because honey bees and humans share aspects of their physiological response to aggressive social encounters, our findings represent a step towards identifying ways to improve individual resiliency. Pre-adult social experience may be crucial to the health of the ecologically threatened honey bee.'

Epigenetics ? :)

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Originally Posted by gavin

Done.

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Thanks.

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Originally Posted by gavin

Interesting paper - even though I choke on the unjustifiable extrapolations and misunderstandings:

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It comes from a University which produced another interesing paper earlier in the year, yet something else to try and think about. Can't help but wonder what, if any, knock on there may be with regard to queen rearing.

I'm thinking too much again.

Nowt wrong with thinking! Especially at this time of year when the beekeeping duties are few.

Yes, DR, epigenetics.

Another thing about that abstract: 'resilience to immune challenge'? Resilience to a chemical challenge and to a parasite. Maybe the bees were just a little hyperactive with the boosted metabolism helping detoxify chemicals and physically deal with Varroa.

The other article is related to this paper, where they really did add p-coumaric acid to Royal jelly and in the process suppress development of the queen's ovaries. Good stuff.

http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/1/7/e1500795

Practical significance? Don't contaminate your queen rearing activities with p-coumaric acid (anyone still use bitten grass stems as tools to transfer larvae?). And perhaps we now have some science behind the view that honey bees respond to gentle (and rough) handling.