The queen bee can survive under water for a week
The bumblebee queen's ability to hibernate could help it withstand flooding, scientists say.
According to Isna, pollinator bees may be present in urban and rural environments, but now researchers have found at least one other species that is even more adaptable than these environments and can survive underwater.
Queens of the common eastern honey bee, a species widespread in eastern North America, can survive underwater for up to a week during hibernation, scientists have shown.
With queen bees burrowing into the soil to hibernate, researchers say this phenomenon could help them survive floods in the wild. The group says their next priority is to see if these results can be generalized to other bee species.
Dr. Sabrina Rondeau of the University of Guelph in Canada says: “We know that about a third of all bee species are in decline right now, but that's not the case with the eastern common bee.” Whether flood tolerance can play a role in their resilience or not.
Rondeau and his co-author Professor Nigel Raine first made the discovery when a mishap in the lab led to water entering containers where queen bees were hibernating.
Curiosity then led to a full-scale experiment with many iterations, Rondo says.
In an article in the journal Biology Letters, the scientists describe how they took 143 unpaired, hibernating queens and placed each in a plastic tube containing moist topsoil. The tubes were then closed with perforated caps and stored in a dark refrigerator for one week.
After checking that the bees were alive, the researchers kept 17 tubes as controls and added cold water to the remaining 126 tubes. While in half of these tubes the queen was allowed to float on top of the water, in the rest of the tubes she was pushed under the water.
In both conditions, one-third of the pipes were left each for eight hours, one-third for 24 hours, and one-third for seven days, simulating different flood conditions. The team then transferred the bees to the new tubes and monitored their survival.
The results show that the survival rate was similar regardless of the duration and conditions the queens were exposed to, and in fact 88% of the bees in the control group and 81% of the queens that were immersed in water for a week were still alive within eight weeks. were alive However, queens with a higher weight had a better chance of survival.
Queens of other bee species are probably flood-resistant, says Rondo.
Among future areas of research, the group says it would be interesting to investigate the mechanisms that enhance the queens' resilience to flooding, considering their low oxygen requirements during hibernation as a possible contributing factor.
Professor Dave Goulson, a bee expert from the University of Sussex who was not involved in the work, said bee enthusiasts had long suspected that increased winter rain amid the climate crisis could kill many of the queen bees that They hibernate underground, sink.
“Surprisingly, this new research shows that putting pollen queens under water during hibernation for a week didn't affect them,” he says. This seems to be one of the small aspects of climate change that we don't need to worry about.
