The international team of scientists comprises: Enrique Peñalver and Eduardo Barrón from the Instituto Geológico y Minero de España in Madrid; Xavier Delclòs from the University of Barcelona; Andre and Patricia Nel from the Muséum national d’histoire naturelle in Paris; Conrad Labandeira from the Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC; and Carmen Soriano and Paul Tafforeau from the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility (ESRF) in Grenoble, France. The amber samples were from the collection of the Museo de Ciencias Naturales de Álava (Spain).

During the last 20 years, amber from the Lower Cretaceous (110-105 my) found in the Basque country in Northern Spain has revealed many new plant and animal species, mainly insects. Here, the amber featured inclusions of thysanopterans, so-called thrips, a group of minute insects of less than 2 mm in length that feed on pollen and other plant tissues. They are efficient pollinators for several species of flowering plants.

Two amber pieces revealed six fossilized specimens of female thrips with hundreds of pollen grains attached to their bodies. These insects exhibit highly specialized hairs with a ringed structure to increase their ability to collect pollen grains, very similar to the ones of well known pollinators like domestic bees. The scientists describe these six specimens in a new genus (Gymnopollisthrips) comprising two new species, G. minor and G. major.

Only amber can preserve behavioral features like pollination in such rich detail over millions of years. 100 million years ago, flowering plants started to diversify enormously, eventually replacing conifers as the dominant species. “This is the oldest direct evidence for pollination, and the only one from the age of the dinosaurs. The co-evolution of flowering plants and insects, thanks to pollination, is a great evolutionary success story. It began about 100 million years ago, when this piece of amber fossil was produced by resin dropping from a tree, which today is the oldest fossil record of pollinating insects. Thrips might indeed turn out to be one of the first pollinator groups in geological history, long before evolution turned some of them into flower pollinators”, concludes Carmen Soriano, who led the investigation of the amber pieces with X-ray tomography at the ESRF.

An over-the-counter natural remedy derived from honeybee hives arrests the growth of prostate cancer cells and tumors in mice, according to a new paper from researchers at the University of Chicago Medicine.

Caffeic acid phenethyl ester, or CAPE, is a compound isolated from honeybee hive propolis, the resin used by bees to patch up holes in hives. Propolis has been used for centuries as a natural remedy for conditions ranging from sore throats and allergies to burns and cancer. But the compound has not gained acceptance in the clinic due to scientific questions about its effect on cells.

In a paper published in Cancer Prevention Research, researchers combined traditional cancer research methods with cutting-edge proteomics to find that CAPE arrests early-stage prostate cancer by shutting down the tumor cells’ system for detecting sources of nutrition.

“If you feed CAPE to mice daily, their tumors will stop growing. After several weeks, if you stop the treatment, the tumors will begin to grow again at their original pace,” said Richard B. Jones, PhD, assistant professor in the Ben May Department for Cancer Research and Institute for Genomics and Systems Biology and senior author of the study. “So it doesn’t kill the cancer, but it basically will indefinitely stop prostate cancer proliferation.”

Natural remedies isolated from plant and animal products are often marketed as cure-alls for a variety of maladies, usually based on vague antioxidant and anti-inflammatory claims. While substances such as ginseng or green tea have been occasionally tested in laboratories for their medicinal properties, scientific evidence is commonly lacking on the full biological effects of these over-the-counter compounds.

“It’s only recently that people have examined the mechanism by which some of these herbal remedies work,” Jones said. “Our knowledge about what these things are actually doing is a bit of a disconnected hodge-podge of tests and labs and conditions. In the end, you’re left with a broad, disconnected story about what exactly these things are doing and whether or not they would be useful for treating disease.”

To study the purported anti-cancer properties of CAPE, first author Chih-Pin Chuu (now at the National Health Research Institutes in Taiwan) tested the compound on a series of cancer cell lines. Even at the low concentrations expected after oral administration, CAPE successfully slowed the proliferation of cultured cells isolated from human prostate tumors.

CAPE was also effective at slowing the growth of human prostate tumors grafted into mice. Six weeks of treatment with the compound decreased tumor volume growth rate by half, but when CAPE treatment was stopped, tumor growth resumed its prior rate. The results suggested that CAPE stopped cell division rather than killing cancerous cells.

To determine the cellular changes that mediated this effect, the researchers then used an innovative proteomics technique invented by Jones and colleagues called the “micro-western array.” Western blots are a common laboratory tool used to measure the changes in protein levels and activity under different conditions. But whereas only one or a few proteins at a time can be monitored with Western blots, micro-western arrays allow researchers to survey hundreds of proteins at once from many samples.

Chuu, Jones and their colleagues ran micro-western arrays to assess the impact of CAPE treatment on the proteins of cellular pathways involved in cell growth – experiments that would have been prohibitively expensive without the new technique.

“What this allowed us to do is screen about a hundred different proteins across a broad spectrum of signaling pathways that are associated with all sorts of different outcomes. You can pick up all the pathways that are affected and get a global landscape view, and that’s never been possible before,” Jones said. “It would have taken hundreds of Westerns, hundreds of technicians, and a very large amount of money for antibodies.”

The micro-western array results allowed researchers to quickly build a new model of CAPE’s cellular effects, significantly expanding on previous work that studied the compound’s mechanisms. Treatment with CAPE at the concentrations that arrested cancer cell growth suppressed the activity of proteins in the p70S6 kinase and Akt pathways, which are important sensors of sufficient nutrition that can trigger cell proliferation.

“It appears that CAPE basically stops the ability of prostate cancer cells to sense that there’s nutrition available,” Jones said. “They stop all of the molecular signatures that would suggest that nutrition exists, and the cells no longer have that proliferative response to nutrition.”

The ability of CAPE to freeze cancer cell proliferation could make it a promising co-treatment alongside chemotherapies intended to kill tumor cells. Jones cautioned that clinical trials would be necessary before CAPE could be proven effective and safe for this purpose in humans. But the CAPE experiments offer a precedent to unlock the biological mechanisms of other natural remedies as well, perhaps allowing these compounds to cross over to the clinic.

“A typical problem in bringing some of these herbal remedies into the clinic is that nobody knows how they act, nobody knows the mechanism, and therefore researchers are typically very hesitant to add them to any pharmaceutical treatment strategy,” Jones said. “Now we’ll actually be able to systematically demonstrate the parts of cell physiology that are affected by these compounds.”

The Apiculture/ Beekeeping Industry is recognized as a small industry – vital, important, but small.  Not very many companies want to get involved in it as many times research and investment are expensive, with little immediate return that can be projected. Generally beekeepers go to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), universities or private industry looking for help. Sometimes it comes, but most of the time it doesn’t.

Now we have a company committed to ag r&d that acquired Beeologics. They know nothing about honey bees, right?

Actually, they do. Monsanto knows that honey bees are a key component to successful sustainable agriculture globally. They know that honey bees are responsible for one-third of the food we eat. The acres of pollinator-dependent crops are the largest ever in the history of the world and growing along with population increases. Food is more than calories; it is nutrition. And with incomes increasing, there is more and more demand for fruits, nuts, vegetables and berries that enhance a diet nutritionally.

Monsanto is committed to sustainable agriculture. It makes good business sense to support sustainable agriculture and that’s why they want to use their time, talents and resources to contribute positively to honey bee health. This is not a PR stunt; this is a smart business move to help agriculture globally.

In the short time I’ve been with Monsanto it is clear to me that my company is spending time and energy on  bee health and also really wants to listen, collaborate and learn from knowledgeable third parties.  It is really a pleasant surprise and makes this much more real for me.

Me, being able (on a small scale) to help this large company filled with smart and committed scientists, to develop  a safe and effective honey bee health products is a great opportunity. I have been in the beekeeping industry for 25+ years and have never seen this type of commitment by a large ag company. I had a great job in Florida as the Chief of the Apiary Section for the Commissioner of Agriculture. The weather was good, the collaboration with the industry was terrific, and I had a great Commissioner to work for. I’ve written the “Classroom” column in the American Bee Journal for 20 + years and wrote a book by the same name, and have served on all sorts of councils, committees and boards.

And over all those years and all these things, we were always dealing with the lack of resources to control honey bee pests, parasites and diseases.

So now we have an opportunity to do this. I have my personal neck stretched waaaay outside of my shell. But, nothing ventured, nothing gained. Question my sanity or intelligence but not my motivation.   I appreciate my new employer giving me a chance to bring the two worlds together.

The researchers analyzed this relationship on the basis of 60 crops, such as coffee, cocoa, apples and soya beans, which are dependent upon pollination by animals, mostly insects such as honeybees and wild bees, butterflies or bumble bees. These investigations enabled them to create a global map showing the dependence of agricultural yields upon pollination. “We can now estimate with a high degree of spatial resolution how large this contribution is in many regions”, says the main author, Dr. Sven Lautenbach, researcher in the UFZ Department of Landscape Ecology. Particularly countries such as China, India, the USA, Brazil and Japan greatly benefit from pollination-dependent products. For the first time, the researchers have analyzed this effect at the regional level: In the USA, for example, the dependence is particularly high in California and in the corn belt in the Midwest relatively unimportant. In Asia the northeast region of China is particularly dependent upon pollination, in Europe primarily the Mediterranean countries, such as Italy or Greece, and in Africa especially the region along the Nile in Egypt. For Germany the researchers found moderate dependencies – nevertheless, in Germany as well pollination is in no way immaterial.

Globally, the value of pollination-dependent agricultural products, and therefore the value of this ecosystem service, has risen continuously. This is attributable to a significant increase in production quantities for pollination-dependent crops. Since 2001 the costs of production for pollination-dependent crops have also risen significantly, indeed far faster than the prices of non-pollination-dependent field crops such as rice, grains or maize. For the researchers this is an indication that the intensification of agriculture is reflected in a global price increase for pollination-dependent cultures. When fields are sprayed with more pesticides, more fertilizers are applied and valuable agricultural structural elements, such as hedges and rows of trees, are transformed into fields, the insects vanish. Consequently, the extent of pollination is reduced, and this is reflected in higher production prices. “We see this price increase as an initial warning signal that conflicts could arise between the services of insect-related pollination and other agricultural interests”, says Sven Lautenbach. For example, if such valuable habitats for insects as hedges, rows of trees or field margin structures continue to disappear and be transformed into agricultural areas or residential areas in the countries in which production takes place, in future the prices for coffee and cocoa will likely rise in future.

According to the calculations of the researchers, a potential decline of pollination could particularly affect those countries in which pollination-dependent crops or cultures represent a substantial part of the gross domestic product from agriculture. This includes, for example, Argentina, Belgium, China, Ghana, Honduras, the Ivory Coast, and Jordan. The researchers have also been able to show, that in countries such as Azerbaijan, Armenia, Cameroon or the Ukraine the relative dependence on these agricultural products has increased significantly between 1993 and 2009. In countries such as Egypt, India, Jordan or Turkey, on the other hand, the relative dependence declined during the same period.

The results of the spatial analysis provide important information for nature conservation practice and political decisions. This enables the development of recommendations at the regional level for the protection of agricultural elements vital for the survival of insects. Furthermore, the information could be used to set up market instruments such as payment for ecosystem services (PES). This instruments could for example, require users benefitting from pollination services to pay for these services. “This could encourage incentives for the protection of insects and their pollination services”, says Sven Lautenbach. Benjamin Haerdle.

GHAZNI PROVINCE, Afghanistan – U.S. Army National Guard Sgt. 1st Class Jon Martinez, Texas Agribusiness Development Team 5 Animal Husbandry non-commissioned officer and project manager assistant supply NCO, farms honey bees native to Ghazni province to assist the Department of Agriculture Irrigation and Livestock specialists in teaching local Afghans how to start their own apiary business.

The apiary project is a passion of Martinez that he established while still in the United States. He has shared his knowledge and love for the project with the Afghans of Ghazni province.

The local Polish and Afghan radio station on Forward Operating Base Ghazni allows Martinez to bring in DAIL specialists to host an agriculture talk show. This allows important information to get out to the local public and gives farmers the opportunity to call and get questions answered by Afghan professionals.

Martinez has made great ties with the DAIL apiary specialists, and together they have set up training that will allow 10 Afghans at a time to attend apiary classes and gain the knowledge needed to run their own business. Upon graduation, each member will be given the tools and bees to start a business in the community.

“I am proud to have been able to get the right help out to the more remote districts and farm areas,” said Martinez. “The agriculture information that goes out on the radio is most rewarding to me because in a small way I helped get the messages out to the Afghan people.”

Members of Texas ADT 5 have worked with the local Afghan community for nearly eight months and through education and demonstrations, the Afghan agriculture specialists and farmers in Ghazni province’s produce and livestock have flourished.

What worker bees do depends on how old they are. A worker a few days old will become a nurse bee that devotes herself to feeding larvae (brood), secreting beeswax to seal the cells that contain brood and attending to the queen.

After about a week, she will progress to other tasks, such as grooming nest mates, ventilating the nest and packing pollen. Only at the end of her life will she become a forager, venturing forth to collect nectar and pollen for the colony.

Yehuda Ben-Shahar, PhD, assistant professor of biology in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, wondered if this highly stereotyped system of task allocation wasn’t somehow under genetic control.

In an article published in the advance online edition of Genes, Brain and Behavior April 6, he and colleagues from Washington University, the University of Delaware, the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and the Institute for System Biology in Seattle, demonstrate that the division of labor among honeybees coincides with the presence in their brains of tiny snippets of noncoding RNA, called micro-RNAs, or miRNAs, that suppress the expression of genes.

Forager bees that venture out to collect nectar and pollen have higher levels of some miRNAs in their brains than nurse bees that are devoted to tending to brood.

By comparing honeybee miRNAs to those of wasps, bees and ants, the scientists also showed that eusocial insects share many miRNAs that are absent in solitary insects. (Eusociality is an extreme form of social organization in which organisms care for young communally and give up reproductive rights to a queen.)

The pattern of conservation across species suggests that miRNAS, are important regulators of social behavior not just during the bee’s lifetime but also over evolutionary time.

Working for a living

Ben-Shahar chose the honeybee (Apis mellifera) as his model organism for the genetic control of behavior because the worker bees display such well-characterized division of labor.

Task allocation in honeybees is highly scripted, and yet the script is flexible enough to respond to labor shortages. If there aren’t enough nurse bees in the colony, nurses will stick with their tasks past the usual age limit, becoming what are called overage nurses. And if there aren’t enough foragers, bees too young for that role will rush to take it on, becoming precocious foragers.

For the scientists this plasticity makes bees a very powerful behavioral model. By comparing overage nurses to precocious foragers it is possible to compare gene expression in different behavioral states without the confounding factor of age.

A tiny off-switch

Ben-Shahar was curious about the role newly discovered molecules called miRNAs might play in the control of behavior.

Francis Crick, the co-discoverer of the structure of DNA, said in 1956 that the central dogma of biology is that DNA makes RNA makes protein — and protein then does the cell’s work, including activating other genes.

The central dogma still holds, but in the past 50 years it has been enormously complicated by the discovery of many mechanisms for regulating gene expression, including a proliferation of regulatory RNAs.

Among these are miRNAS, tiny snippets of noncoding RNA typically only 22 nucleotide units long that bind to RNA transcripts of a gene, reducing protein production and, in effect, silencing the gene.

Micro-RNAs are known to regulate development and disease processes such as cancer, Ben-Shahar says.

“We wondered if they weren’t playing a role in regulating social behaviors,” he says, “because recent studies have implicated them in complex nervous-system functions such as neurodevelopment, psychiatric disease, and circadian clocks.”

A library of possibilities

Because nobody knew much about the miRNAs in bees, Ben-Shahar and the paper’s first author, undergraduate student Jacob Greenberg (now a medical student at WUSTL’s School of Medicine), decided to make a grand survey of the miRNA “library” in a bee’s head.

They ground up heads, extracted the RNA from the tissue, sorted out the small RNA fragments, and sent those to a company that sequences DNA (or RNA, which is a similar molecule).

Because the entire honeybee genome has been sequenced, the short sequences the company supplied could be compared with the bee genome and non-matching sequences discarded as junk.

Various criteria were applied to the remaining sequences to whittle the candidates down to true miRNAs.

All of this sorting and sifting was done in collaboration with Weixiong Zhang, PhD, professor of computer science and engineering in the School of Engineering & Applied Science, who is an expert in computational biology.

“Zhang’s lab has a lot of experience doing the bioinformatics part, which is important because not every little snippet of RNA is a miRNA; there are certain criteria they use to prove it’s an miRNA,” says Ben-Shahar.

At the end of this monumental cataloguing effort, the scientists had a list of 97 miRNAs that are expressed in the heads of honeybees, including 17 that had never been identified before, and many others that had been found in flies and mammals but not in bees.

Five prime suspects

To design a manageable behavioral experiment, the scientists then selected five of the 97 miRNAs for closer inspection. These five were either very abundant or had been implicated in neural function in other organisms.

The scientists then manipulated two colonies of bees to produce cohorts of nurse and forager bees that were the same age, either young for foragers or old for nurses.

They dissected out the brains of their precocious foragers and overage nurses and measured the level of expression of the miRNAs in the brains with a sensitive test called the Northern Blot.

“We found that the level of expression of four of these miRNAS correlated with the task the bee was performing. Four of them were expressed at higher levels in foragers than in nurses. Because miRNAs typically suppress gene expression, this means genes actively transcribed in nurses were silenced in foragers,” Ben-Shahar says.

“There is clearly a task-related difference, but we don’t yet know what the gene targets of the miRNAs are,” he says.

An ancient regulatory system

Could miRNAs be playing a much broader role in the behavior of bees, not just regulating the tasks workers performed but also their social behavior more generally?

Honeybees are eusocial insects, meaning that a colony behaves more like a superorganism than a gathering of individuals. The scientists knew that the genomes of several other eusocial insects had recently been sequenced.

Did the eusocial insects share miRNAs, they wondered?
The grand survey of miRNAs had identified 20 miRNAs that seemed to be honeybee-specific. To test their idea, they looked for these miRNAs in the genomes of four other eusocial insects within the hymenoptera (an order of insects that consists of ants, bees and wasps) and in that of a solitary wasp.

A total of 19 out of the 20 miRNAs that had initially appeared to be honeybee-specific were also identified in the genomes of the other eusocial insects. Moreover, five found in all the eusocial hymenoptera were found in no other species. And none of the 20 miRNAS found in the eusocial insects were found in the genome of the solitary wasp.

Once a miRNA assumes a functional role it is rarely lost from an animal’s genome, Ben-Shahar says, because it typically regulates multiple genes and is too thoroughly enmeshed in the cell’s regulation to be easily extracted. This makes miRNAs a valuable marker for evolutionary relationships among species.

The relationships among eusocial species could do with clarification. Ants and bees diverged a long time ago, and all ant species are eusocial, but bee species run the gamut from solitary to eusocial.

That pattern makes sense, Ben-Shahar says, only if the eusocial trait evolved more than once as new species evolved. Something in hymenoptera DNA may have made that group of animals more sensitive than others to whatever evolutionary pressures led to social behavior, he says.

Genetic control of human behavior is undoubtedly more complicated, Ben-Shahar says, but he points out that the human genome encodes close to 2,000 miRNAS, including two of the five he studied in bee brains, and these 2,000 miRNAs are thought to target roughly 60 percent of our genes

RIVERSIDE, Calif. — Entomologists at the University of California, Riverside have a “proof of concept” that selenium, a nonmetal chemical element, can disrupt the foraging behavior and survival of honey bees.

Selenium in very low concentrations is necessary for the normal development of insects — and humans — but becomes toxic at only slightly higher concentrations when it replaces sulfur in amino acids. In soils, particularly in Pacific Rim countries and near coal-fired power plants worldwide, it occurs most often in soluble forms, such as selenate.

Wondering what effect selenium concentrations in plants has on honey bees, John T. Trumble, a professor of entomology, and Kristen R. Hladun, his graduate student, performed controlled greenhouse experiments in which they documented the selenium amounts that three plant species — two kinds of mustards and one weedy radish plant — incorporate into their nectar and pollen after the plants had been irrigated with low to moderate levels of the trace mineral.

They then allowed honey bees to visit the plants. They found that the bees fed on food sources, such as flowers that contained selenium at even very high concentrations.

“Nature has not equipped bees to avoid selenium,” Trumble said. “Unless the rates of concentrations of selenium were extremely high in our experiments, the bees did not appear to respond to its presence.”

Two of the rates of irrigation water Trumble and Hladun tested had selenium concentrations — 0.5 and 0.7 parts per million — that were well below concentrations considered by the US government to be of concern.

“We found, however, that in weedy radish plants even these low rates produced selenium amounts of 60 parts per million in the nectar and 400 to 800 parts per million in the pollen,” Hladun said. “But despite these high amounts, the bees would not avoid the selenium.”

The researchers also found that bees that had been fed selenate in the lab were less responsive to sugar (as sucrose).

“The selenium interfered with their sucrose response,” Hladun explained. “Such bees would be less likely to recruit bees to forage because they wouldn’t be stimulated to communicate information about sucrose availability to the sister bees.”

Trumble and Hladun also measured the mortality of forager bees that were fed selenium chronically (moderate selenium amounts over a few days). They found that these bees died at a significantly younger age.

Study results appear this month in PLoS ONE.

The researchers note that their work, performed in the laboratory, needs to be done next in the field because the bees’ reduced response to sugar could diminish floral resources needed to support coworker bees and larvae in the field.

In preliminary studies they conducted in the field, the researchers found that some foragers leaving radish plants were carrying pollen with high concentrations of selenium. Further, they noted that plants with high concentrations of selenium were being visited by foragers just as frequently as were plants with no selenium, suggesting that the bees do not avoid feeding on selenium.

“The consequences of their inability to avoid selenium could be substantial,” Trumble said. “We must emphasize that our data do not show that large losses of honey bees are currently occurring or that there is any relationship with Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD). Field studies need to be conducted to determine if honey bees collect enough selenium from contaminated plants to cause significant effects on learning, behavior and adult or larval survival.”

The researchers already have received a three-year $480,000 grant from USDA-NIFA to take their research from the lab to the field. The grant, which will support Hladun’s postdoctoral work at UCR, will allow the researchers also to investigate other elements, such as cadmium and lead, which have been found in urban honeybee hives.

“In our lab experiments, we focused on individual bees,” said Hladun, who will graduate with a Ph.D. this summer. “But bees are social insects. In our future work, we plan also to focus on whole colony health.”

Selenium occurs naturally in certain soils from shale deposits of prehistoric inland seas. Agricultural drainage dissolves selenium from these soils and causes the buildup of selenate. One of the worst cases of selenium pollution is the San Joaquin Valley in California, a major drainage site for many of the state’s agricultural regions and an area that has reported honey bee loss due to CCD.

“The colony is willing to expend the energy and effort of its worker bees to collect these resins,” says Dr. Michael Simone-Finstrom, a postdoctoral research scholar in NC State’s Department of Entomology and lead author of a paper describing the research. “So, clearly this behavior has evolved because the benefit to the colony exceeds the cost.”

When faced with pathogenic fungi, bees line their hives with more propolis – the waxy, yellow substance seen here.

Wild honey bees normally line their hives with propolis, a mixture of plant resins and wax that has antifungal and antibacterial properties. Domesticated honey bees also use propolis, to fill in cracks in their hives. However, researchers found that, when faced with a fungal threat, bees bring in significantly more propolis – 45 percent more, on average. The bees also physically removed infected larvae that had been parasitized by the fungus and were being used to create fungal spores.

Researchers know propolis is an effective antifungal agent because they lined some hives with a propolis extract and found that the extract significantly reduced the rate of infection.

And apparently bees can sometimes distinguish harmful fungi from harmless ones, since colonies did not bring in increased amounts of propolis when infected with harmless fungal species. Instead, the colonies relied on physically removing the spores.

However, the self-medicating behavior does have limits. Honey bee colonies infected with pathogenic bacteria did not bring in significantly more propolis – despite the fact that the propolis also has antibacterial properties. “There was a slight increase, but it was not statistically significant,” Simone-Finstrom says. “That is something we plan to follow up on.”

There may be a lesson here for domestic beekeepers. “Historically, U.S. beekeepers preferred colonies that used less of this resin, because it is sticky and can be difficult to work with,” Simone-Finstrom says. “Now we know that this is a characteristic worth promoting, because it seems to offer the bees some natural defense.”

The paper, “Increased resin collection after parasite challenge: a case of self-medication in honey bees?,” was co-authored by Dr. Marla Spivak of the University of Minnesota and published March 29 in PLoS ONE. The research was funded by the National Science Foundation.

To access these abstracts click on the link – 2012 Proceedings of the Bee Research Conference

These abstracts represent some of the latest bee research being conducted in the United States.  Enjoy!