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Data from: Honey bee immune response to trace concentrations of clothianidin goes beyond the macronutrients found in artificial diets

Metadata Updated: July 11, 2025

Honey bees (Apis mellifera) often encounter a variety of stressors in their environment, including poor nutrition and pesticides. These stressors interact and can be exacerbated in large-scale agroecosystems. We investigated how diets varying in macronutrient ratios can affect nurse bee susceptibility to pesticide stressors. Nurse bees were fed trace concentrations of clothianidin (CLO), a neonicotinoid insecticide known to have sublethal and lethal effects on honey bees, after newly emerged bees were given diets varying in proteins and lipids, a natural pollen diet, or sucrose solution diet. Bees given pollen had improved longevity, physiology, enzyme activity, and gene expression related to pesticide detoxification. The artificial diets helped improve bee health and physiology but did little to promote bee detoxification enzymes and genes. There was no effect of the trace CLO treatments on its own, but there was an interactive effect between our higher CLO treatment and poor nutrition on bee longevity and vitellogenin expression. Our results suggest that 1.) exposure to even trace concentrations of CLO can interact with poor nutrition to undermine adult bee health and 2.) macronutrients in artificial diets can help promote bee physiology, but other nutrients in pollen, such as potentially phytochemicals, are more directly linked honey bee tolerance to pesticide stress.This work was supported by United States Department of Agriculture, Agricultural Research Service, Research Project No. 6066-21000-001-000-D, Ecological Assessment and Mitigation Strategies to Reduce the Risks of Bees to Stressors in Southern Crop Ecosystems.

Access & Use Information

Public: This dataset is intended for public access and use. License: Creative Commons Attribution

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Dates

Metadata Created Date May 8, 2025
Metadata Updated Date July 11, 2025

Metadata Source

Harvested from USDA JSON

Additional Metadata

Resource Type Dataset
Metadata Created Date May 8, 2025
Metadata Updated Date July 11, 2025
Publisher Agricultural Research Service
Maintainer
Identifier 10.15482/USDA.ADC/26026723.v2
Data Last Modified 2025-06-30
Public Access Level public
Bureau Code 005:18
Metadata Context https://project-open-data.cio.gov/v1.1/schema/catalog.jsonld
Schema Version https://project-open-data.cio.gov/v1.1/schema
Catalog Describedby https://project-open-data.cio.gov/v1.1/schema/catalog.json
Harvest Object Id 62d8c6e6-e5db-4741-8bd0-4371697e76da
Harvest Source Id d3fafa34-0cb9-48f1-ab1d-5b5fdc783806
Harvest Source Title USDA JSON
License https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Program Code 005:040
Source Datajson Identifier True
Source Hash 8c13392782602ad24a576be770bbc5990c10457d56242639702458f935bcd94e
Source Schema Version 1.1
Temporal 2022-06-01/2024-03-31

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