Honey is a lot better for you than high fructose corn syrup, and it seems the same is true for bees. A new study is showing that feeding bees with honey significantly reduces the rate of "Colony Collapse Disorder."
Colony Collapse Disorder is a strange phenomenon where worker bees will leave their hive and not return. Researchers now believe that this condition is related to pesticides and pathogens.
A team of scientists from the University of Illinois conducted the study, and found that bee hives are sprayed with a pesticide that keeps a certain type of mite from attacking it. Unfortunately, bees have trouble detoxifying these chemicals, as they only have half of the genes that help other insects use to break them down.
"Bees feed on hundreds of different types of nectar and pollen, and are potentially exposed to thousands of different types of phytochemicals, yet they only have one-third to one-half the inventory of enzymes that break down these toxins compared to other species," said May Berenbaum, a professor of entomology at the University of Illinois and the lead author of the study, in a news release.
To make matters worse, farmers tend to feed the bees high fructose corn syrup as a honey substitute, as it is significantly cheaper. According to the research, this makes the bee populations much more vulnerable to the chemicals used in the pesticides. Scientists found that wild honey bees, who feed mainly on honey, are able to better activate genes necessary to breaking down the pesticide chemicals.
"If I were a beekeeper, I would at least try to give them some honey year-round because if you look at the evolutionary history of Apis mellifera, this species did not evolve with high fructose corn syrup. It is clear that honey bees are highly adapted to consuming honey as part of their diet," Berenbaum concluded.
The study was published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
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