PARIS: Chemicals found in flowers of some plants are a “natural medicine cabinet” for ailing bees infested with one common intestinal parasite, a study has found.
The naturally occurring chemicals, which plants produce to protect themselves against predators, have also been shown to be beneficial for bees that consume them along with the flowers’ nectar, research led by Dartmouth College has shown.
In experiments, infected eastern bumblebees showed reduced levels of the Crithidia bombi parasites in their gut after 7 days of consuming the natural plant toxins as they gathered nectar.
Infection levels in the bees, Bombus impatiens, were down by more than 80 percent at the end of the experiment, researchers said.
Crithidia can shorten the lifespan of individual bees and can reduce the queen production in a colony.
“We found that eating some of these compounds reduced pathogen load in the bumblebee’s gut, which not only may help the individual bees, but likely reduced the pathogen Crithidia spore load in their feces, which in turn should lead to a lower likelihood of transmitting the disease to other bees,” says evolutionary ecologist Lynn Adler at UMass Amherst.
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