Honey Bee Probiotic to Help Protect Colonies from Insecticides

Combats Colony Collapse by Detoxifying Insecticides That Worker Bees Bring Back to the Hive

This probiotic designed for honey bees enables them to degrade ingested pesticides, which should help protect the colony. Honey bees are key pollinators for many crops, adding $15 billion in value to U.S. agricultural production per year. “Colony collapse disorder,” when the majority of a colony’s worker bees abandon the hive and leave behind a queen, food, and immature bees, is one problem plaguing honey bees.. Although all of the causes of colony collapse disorder aren’t known, this problem threatens both commercial beekeeping and production of many crops that depend on pollination by honey bees. One of the major stressors leading to colony collapse is thought to be non-target exposure to agricultural pesticides used to control insect pests and insects that vector crop diseases. Although the residual concentration of insecticide on crops is usually nonlethal to the worker bees directly, these toxins are often present in the nectar and pollen collected and carried back to the colony and have a chronic negative effect on the overall health of a colony.

Researchers at the University of Florida have developed modified bacteria (that are normally associated with honey bees) that have the ability to detoxify some of the major classes of insecticide to which bees will be exposed. These modified bacteria are essentially a probiotic that will detoxify many of the insecticides thought to contribute to colony collapse disorder.

Application

Probiotic for honey bees that detoxifies commonly used agricultural insecticides and thus minimizes off-target effects on honey bee colonies and helps maintain hive productivity

Advantages

• Enables honey bees to degrade insecticides, helping prevent colony collapse
• Easily administered to colonies in supplemental feed sources, adding little additional labor cost
• Protects honey bees from off-target use of insecticides needed to control insect pests

Technology

Researchers engineer the bacteria normally associated with honey bees to produce enzymes that will degrade (detoxify) commonly used agricultural insecticides such as synthetic pyrethroids, organophosphates, and neonicotinoids. These modified bacteria that live in the gut of honey bees will be spread among both workers as well as the queen, drones and larvae, protecting the entire colony from the sub-lethal, but negative effects of insecticides that almost inevitably will be picked up by workers.