{"id":294845,"date":"2026-07-13T21:02:12","date_gmt":"2026-07-13T21:02:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/294845\/"},"modified":"2026-07-13T21:02:12","modified_gmt":"2026-07-13T21:02:12","slug":"honeybee-queens-offload-pesticides-to-their-eggs-to-survive","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/294845\/","title":{"rendered":"Honeybee queens offload pesticides to their eggs to survive"},"content":{"rendered":"

Worker bees are the first line of defence when it comes to removing contamination in honeybee colonies, but a queen has her ways, too.<\/p>\n

A honeybee queen facing chronic exposure to pesticides will take up that contamination and pass it along to her eggs, a process researchers call maternal offloading.<\/p>\n

Why it matters<\/p>\n

Pesticide exposure in the field doesn\u2019t stop at the worker bees. This research is the first to show a queen will pass her own chemical load to her eggs, which means the timing of foraging and colony buildup could carry longer hive-health consequences than growers, beekeepers and IPM planners have accounted for.<\/p>\n

The findings<\/a>, which document for the first time the extent a queen will go to survive, are published in the journal Current <\/a>Biology<\/a>. Research was led by the University of California, Davis.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn order to protect herself, the queen bee offloads these chemicals into her eggs to get rid of them,\u201d said Sascha <\/a>Nicklisch<\/a>, the paper\u2019s senior author and an associate professor in the Department of Environmental Toxicology. \u201cNo one has shown this in honeybees before.\u201d<\/p>\n

Research was conducted in conjunction with Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, or LLNL, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture\u2019s Agricultural Research Service, or USDA-ARS.<\/p>\n

Read Also<\/p>\n


\n \"ribbon
\n <\/a><\/p>\n

\"Honey<\/p>\n

Honey bee eggs in hive comb cells.
\n Photo:
\n Sascha Nicklisch\/UC Davis<\/p>\n

A tipping point for queen and colony health<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen pesticides accumulate to the extent that the queen bee has eggs that are so loaded they may no longer develop properly, there could be a tipping point,\u201d Nicklisch said. \u201cThere may be a slow creeping effect of chemical accumulation that will contribute to delayed colony collapse.\u201d<\/p>\n

Toxicology studies on honeybees have generally focused on worker bees. However, this research looked at where chemicals get deposited in the hive and how that affects the entire colony, including the queen, her ovaries, the eggs and the wax. Inside a colony, worker bees feed and care for queens and developing larvae.<\/p>\n

By the numbers<\/p>\n

95% to 86% \u2014 worker filtration of the pesticide, day one to day 10
\n1 queen + 60 workers \u2014 the size of each test \u201cnanocolony\u201d
\n1,500\u20132,000 \u2014 eggs a healthy queen lays per day
\n~1\/3 \u2014 share of the world\u2019s food crops honeybees pollinate<\/p>\n

It has long been thought that queens are protected by worker bees that filter out contamination from the food they give to queens, but the scientists are seeing a limit to this protection, said Angela Encerrado-Manriquez, the lead author on the paper and a recent Ph.D. graduate from UC Davis.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn our study, pesticides began to accumulate in queens over time, suggesting that worker filtration capacity can be overwhelmed,\u201d Encerrado-Manriquez said. \u201cWhen this happens, queens have their own defence. Maternal offloading allows them to shunt the toxic burden to their eggs.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"One<\/p>\n

One of the nanocolony environments created by researchers to represent a typical honey bee hive.
\n Photo:
\n Angela Encerrado-Manriquez\/UC Davis<\/p>\n

How researchers tracked the pesticide inside the hive<\/p>\n

Researchers created so-called \u201cnanocolonies,\u201d which represent the inner workings and functions of a hive and colony using conical plastic containers fitted with netted bottoms. Each nanocolony contained one queen and 60 worker bees.<\/p>\n

The bees were given pollen, water and food tainted with the pesticide methyl parathion that was tagged with a low-level radioactive marker to enable tracking. In the first day, worker bees were able to filter out 95 per cent of the pesticide and deposit it into the honeycomb, but that number fell to 86 per cent by day 10.<\/p>\n

The research was possible via a collaboration between the USDA, which provided unique expertise in honeybee biology and study design, and LLNL, which was able to measure radioactive tags down to the atomic level using a biological accelerator mass spectrometry, or BioAMS.<\/p>\n

\u201cWith BioAMS, we can trace very low levels of a pesticide,\u201d said Bruce Buchholz, an LLNL scientist and author on the paper. \u201cThe pesticide concentrations we used were not lethal and were environmentally relevant to that seen in nature.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"A<\/p>\n

A sample of paraffin wax removed from a research nanocolony.
\n Photo:
\n Angela Encerrado-Manriquez \/UC Davis<\/p>\n

Why the queen\u2019s egg output is the whole colony\u2019s lifeline<\/p>\n

Honeybee queens can lay 1,500 to 2,000 eggs per day to support their hives, which pollinate about one-third of the world\u2019s food crops. Losing colonies diminishes agricultural productivity and food security.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe queen is the only member of the hive who can lay eggs that become the next generation of workers,\u201d Nicklisch said. \u201cShe keeps the colony alive, so understanding how pesticides can affect queen bees and also her offspring is important.\u201d<\/p>\n

How long queens can pass along contamination, the long-term effects on colonies and if it varies by pesticide are other topics for future research.<\/p>\n

Julia Fine and Eliza Litsey with USDA-ARS and David Baliu-Rodriguez, Sean Leonard and Bruce Buchholz at LLNL contributed to the research. The study received support from the USDA\u2019s National Institute of Food and Agriculture and Non-Assistance Cooperative Agreement program, the PAm-Costco USA Scholarship<\/a> program and the University of California National Laboratory Fees Research Program. The work at LLNL is under a U.S. Department of Energy contract.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Worker bees are the first line of defence when it comes to removing contamination in honeybee colonies, but…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":294846,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[37],"tags":[13168,13169,92660,9,24,63,83555,122,124,123,3730],"class_list":["post-294845","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-queens","tag-beekeeping","tag-bees","tag-honeybees","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-nyc","tag-pesticides","tag-queens","tag-queens-headlines","tag-queens-news","tag-research"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/294845","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=294845"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/294845\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/294846"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=294845"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=294845"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=294845"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}