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Bees need food of appropriate nutritional quality to maintain their metabolic functions. They largely obtain all required nutrients from floral resources, i.e., pollen and nectar. However, the diversity, composition and nutritional quality of floral resources varies with the surrounding environment and can be strongly altered in human-impacted habitats. We investigated whether differences in plant species richness as found in the surrounding environment correlated with variation in the floral diversity and nutritional quality of larval provisions (i.e., mixtures of pollen, nectar and salivary secretions) composed by the mass-provisioning stingless bee Tetragonula carbonaria (Apidae: Meliponini). We found that the floral diversity of larval provisions increased with increasing plant species richness. The sucrose and fat (total fatty acid) content and the proportion and concentration of the omega-6 fatty acid linoleic acid decreased, whereas the proportion of the omega-3 fatty acid linolenic acid increased with increasing plant species richness. Protein (total amino acid) content and amino acid composition did not change. The protein to fat (P:F) ratio, known to affect bee foraging, increased on average by more than 40% from plantations to forests and gardens, while the omega-6:3 ratio, known to negatively affect cognitive performance, decreased with increasing plant species richness. Our results suggest that plant species richness may support T. carbonaria colonies by providing not only a continuous resource supply (as shown in a previous study), but also floral resources of high nutritional quality.
The negative impact of juvenile undernourishment on adult behavior has been well reported for vertebrates, but relatively little is known about invertebrates. In honeybees, nutrition has long been known to affect task performance and timing of behavioral transitions. Whether and how a dietary restriction during larval development affects the task performance of adult honeybees is largely unknown. We raised honeybees in-vitro, varying the amount of a standardized diet (150 µl, 160 µl, 180 µl in total). Emerging adults were marked and inserted into established colonies. Behavioral performance of nurse bees and foragers was investigated and physiological factors known to be involved in the regulation of social organization were quantified. Surprisingly, adult honeybees raised under different feeding regimes did not differ in any of the behaviors observed. No differences were observed in physiological parameters apart from weight. Honeybees were lighter when undernourished (150 µl), while they were heavier under the overfed treatment (180 µl) compared to the control group raised under a normal diet (160 µl). These data suggest that dietary restrictions during larval development do not affect task performance or physiology in this social insect despite producing clear effects on adult weight. We speculate that possible effects of larval undernourishment might be compensated during the early period of adult life.
It began with citrus
(2013)
Background
Artificial rearing of honey bee larvae is an established method which enables to fully standardize the rearing environment and to manipulate the supplied diet to the brood. However, there are no studies which compare learning performance or neuroanatomic differences of artificially-reared (in-lab) bees in comparison with their in-hive reared counterparts.
Methods
Here we tested how different quantities of food during larval development affect body size, brain morphology and learning ability of adult honey bees. We used in-lab rearing to be able to manipulate the total quantity of food consumed during larval development. After hatching, a subset of the bees was taken for which we made 3D reconstructions of the brains using confocal laser-scanning microscopy. Learning ability and memory formation of the remaining bees was tested in a differential olfactory conditioning experiment. Finally, we evaluated how bees reared with different quantities of artificial diet compared to in-hive reared bees.
Results
Thorax and head size of in-lab reared honey bees, when fed the standard diet of 160 µl or less, were slightly smaller than hive bees. The brain structure analyses showed that artificially reared bees had smaller mushroom body (MB) lateral calyces than their in-hive counterparts, independently of the quantity of food they received. However, they showed the same total brain size and the same associative learning ability as in-hive reared bees. In terms of mid-term memory, but not early long-term memory, they performed even better than the in-hive control.
Discussion
We have demonstrated that bees that are reared artificially (according to the Aupinel protocol) and kept in lab-conditions perform the same or even better than their in-hive sisters in an olfactory conditioning experiment even though their lateral calyces were consistently smaller at emergence. The applied combination of experimental manipulation during the larval phase plus subsequent behavioral and neuro-anatomic analyses is a powerful tool for basic and applied honey bee research.
Medical history of obesity
(2013)
This paper contains the following sections, in approximate chronological order: Early years, Scientific research on energy metabolism, Clinical teaching, Evidence on health risks, Slow recognition of obesity in diabetes, Depression and war, some Obesity research continued in the 1950s and 1960s, New approaches to management, a Universal standard weight for height, Luxuskonsumption, Calories (incompletely) replaced by Joules, Food intakes of obese people, Genetics, unexpected Surge of obesity from 1980, Diabetes, Scarcity of effective, safe drugs for obesity, Leptin and Ghrelin stimulate basic research, Why has the obesity epidemic happened? What is the best weight-reducing diet? Bariatric surgery
Welcome to the inaugural meeting of the International Society for Nutritional Psychiatry Research (ISNPR).
It is a great pleasure to have the opportunity to join with colleagues working in this new and exciting field of research. Although there has long been interest in the links between nutritional deficiencies and psychiatric illness, as well as interest in the role of food allergies in such illnesses, the last five years has seen a significant and notable growth in this nascent field of research, with an accompanying impact on the viewpoints and practices of scientists and clinicians working in mental health.
In my particular field of interest – that of the role of overall dietary quality in the common mental disorders, depression and anxiety - there has been an exponential growth in the literature since the end of 2009. It is exciting and gratifying to see concordant results from across the globe, in young children and adolescents through to older adults, and from countries as diverse as Norway and Taiwan.
The study of the efficacy of nutritional interventions in psychiatric illness is also developing rapidly, with high quality randomised controlled trials now being conducted in multiple settings and with outcomes that include cognition as well as depression, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia and anxiety disorders. Another important development in this field is the rapidly growing recognition that nutrition is of central importance in the risk for cognitive decline and dementia. As this new recognition filters through to clinical researchers, I look forward to seeing new interventions in this area.
Another area of research with significant interest and activity grows from the understanding of the centrality of physical health to mental health and vice versa. There are many nutrition researchers, dietitians and other health practitioners working to address the physical health of patients with mental illness; acting on the recognition that physical and mental health are closely related and mutually reinforcing.
There is no doubt that the formation of an international society is timely; we now have the opportunity to join forces to share knowledge and build important collaborations. Building capacity in this field by sharing our knowledge with students and early career researchers will be another important activity of our society, as will building the credibility of nutritional psychiatry research through a clear understanding and implementation of best practice scientific methodology.
I welcome each of you to extend the invitation to join our new ISNPR to colleagues and students in your networks. I would also encourage you to contribute to the discussions and sharing of knowledge by contributing short pieces to our newsletter, which will be disseminated by the end of this year. For those who are unable to attend this year’s meeting, we hope that 2014 may present a possibility for attendance.
Our aim is conduct our first Annual General Meeting before the end of July 2013 via teleconference and I welcome agenda items from those interested.
With very best wishes
Felice Jacka
President ISNPR
Leaf-cutting ants are highly successful herbivores in the Neotropics. They forage large amounts of fresh plant material to nourish a symbiotic fungus that sustains the colony. It is unknown how workers organize the intra-nest distribution of resources, and whether they respond to increasing demands in some fungus gardens by adjusting the amount of delivered resources accordingly. In laboratory experiments, we analyzed the spatial distribution of collected leaf fragments among nest chambers in Acromyrmex ambiguus leaf-cutting ants, and how it changed when one of the fungus gardens experienced undernourishment. Plant fragments were evenly distributed among nest chambers when the fungal symbiont was well nourished. That pattern changed when one of the fungus gardens was undernourished and had a higher leaf demand, resulting in more leaf discs delivered to the undernourished fungus garden over at least 2 days after deprivation. Some ants bypassed nourished gardens to directly deliver their resource to the chamber with higher nutritional demand. We hypothesize that cues arising from that chamber might be used for orientation and/or that informed individuals, presumably stemming from the undernourished chamber, may preferentially orient to them.