Nutritional and prebiotic efficacy of the microalga Arthrospira platensis (spirulina) in honey bees
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Apidologie * The Author(s), 2020 DOI: 10.1007/s13592-020-00770-5
Nutritional and prebiotic efficacy of the microalga Arthrospira platensis (spirulina) in honey bees Vincent A. RICIGLIANO , Michael SIMONE-FINSTROM USDA ARS, Honey Bee Breeding, Genetics and Physiology Research, Baton Rouge, LA 70820, USA Received 16 August 2019 – Revised 17 January 2020 – Accepted 7 April 2020
Abstract – We evaluated the microalga Arthrospira platensis (commonly called spirulina), as a pollen substitute for honey bees. Nutritional analyses indicated that spirulina is rich in essential amino acids and a wide variety of functional lipids (i.e., phospholipids, polyunsaturated fatty acids, and sterols) common in pollen. Feeding bioassays were used to compare dry and fresh laboratory-grown spirulina with bee-collected pollen and a commercial pollen substitute using sucrose syrup as a control. Diets were fed ad libitum as a paste to newly emerged bees in cages (10– 13 cage replicates) and bees were sampled at days 5 and 10 for physiological and molecular measurements. Spirulina diets produced biomarker profiles (thorax weight, head protein content, and beneficial gut bacteria abundance) that were indicative of elevated nutritional states, meeting or exceeding the other diets in some metrics despite reduced consumption. Furthermore, spirulina diets led to significantly increased fat body lipid content and mRNA levels of the central storage lipoprotein vitellogenin. We conclude that spirulina has significant potential as a pollen substitute or prebiotic diet additive to improve honey bee health. Apis mellifera / nutrition / microbiota / microalgae / pollen substitute
1. INTRODUCTION To compensate for periods of forage scarcity or to bolster colony size prior to pollination services, beekeepers routinely feed pollen substitute (PS) diets to honey bees (Nabors 2000; Mattila and Otis 2006). PSs are generally considered a safe way to deliver protein to colonies since feeding bee-collected pollen is cost-prohibitive and difficult to standardize, can transmit disease, and can be contaminated by pesticides (Brodschneider and Crailsheim 2010). These artificial diets consist of a base protein derived from soy, yeast, egg, wheat, Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s13592-020-00770-5) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.
Corresponding author: V. Ricigliano, [email protected] Manuscript editor: David Tarpy
or lentils. Early attempts at formulating PS diets failed to match the nutritional efficacy of pollen and had low palatability (Standifer et al. 1973). Soy products are common ingredients in PSs despite reports of potential anti-nutritional factors such as toxic sugars (Barker 1977) and protease inhibitors (Liener 1994; Sagili et al. 2005). Some more recently developed commercial PSs appear to match the nutritional value of pollen (DeGrandi-Hoffman et al. 2010; De Jong et al. 2009); however, these diets have not been robustly tested and their
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