The effect of a novel dietary supplement based on fish hydrolysate, essential fatty acids and phytochemicals on honey bee nuclei development

RAMOS FACUNDO; SZARWASKI NICOLÁS; MITTON GIULIA A; IGLESIAS AZUCENA; DE FEUDIS LEONARDO; CASTELLINI DAMIAN; GIMÉNEZ MARTÍNEZ P; CORONA MIGUEL; EGUARAS MARTÍN; MAGGI MATÍAS

JOURNAL OF APICULTURAL RESEARCH

INT BEE RESEARCH ASSOC

Año: 2021

0021-8839

Honey bees require multiple sources of nectar and pollen to obtain balanced nutrition.However, increased habitat fragmentation has reduced the availability of floralresources, making necessary the use of nutritional supplementation to restore thenutritional balance of honey bee colonies. The formulation of effective supplementsrequires the identification and testing of candidate components, especially at thecolony-level. In this study, we evaluated the affectivity of a nutritional supplement(SUP) composed by two important phytochemicals that have been reported to improvehoney bee health abscisic acid, p-coumaric acid, fish protein hydrolyzate, and essentialomega fatty acids in nuclei colonies. We first evaluated the toxicity of SUP comparedwith the control (sugar syrup) in laboratory bioassays during 96 hours. Then, we testedthe effect on the amount of brood, honey, and pollen in bee hives nuclei supplementedwhit SUP during thirty days. In addition, we quantified and compared the concentrationof total proteins in individual honey bees collected at the beginning and at the end ofthe experiment. The results obtained show that SUP is palatable, non-toxic to Apismellifera and significative increases the amount of open brood and pollen reserves ofbee nuclei compared with nuclei feed with sugar syrup. No significant differences wereobserved, between nuclei feed with SUP and control nuclei, in the amount of honeyreserves and total proteins of individual bees. Here we show the value of a nutritionalsupplement that combines essential nutritional components and phytochemicals toimprove important parameters associated with colony fitness