Study of honey bee diets and DWV infection

A host can change aspects of its diet in response to pathogen infection as a form of self-medication. Honey bees are benefit from an increase in their nutrient intake when undergoing pathogen stress, however, it is currently unknown if this can be attributed to increased intake of a particular nutritional component. To help answer this question, we experimentally infected day-old honey bees nurses with deformed wing virus (DWV), a common honey bee-infecting pathogen, and conducted cage assays in which we fed cohorts of bees one of four diet groups: a balanced protein-to-lipid (P:L) diet ratio (30P:20L), a relatively high protein diet (40P:10L), a relatively high lipid diet (20P:30L), or a no-pollen diet in which bees were only fed sucrose solution as a negative control. We compared diet consumption, honey bee survivorship, DWV pathogen load, and differences in host physiology (such as hypopharyngeal gland size, lipid content, and gene expression) across the different treatments.This work is relevant to apiculture and how to formulate commercial honey bee diets to help bolster honey bee health. It is also more broadly relevant to the study of how diet affects host-virus interactions.