Brood pheromone. 3/08/07

[BEES4U]

http://www.springerlink.com/content/h785587u758q8t35/

Tanya Pankiw1, 2

(1) Department of Entomology, Texas A&M University, College Station, TX, USA
(2) Department of Entomology, Texas A&M University, College Station, TX 77843-2475, USA

Published online: 8 March 2007

Foraging for pollen is an important behavior of the honey bee because pollen is their sole source of protein. Through nurse bees, larvae are the principal consumers of pollen. Fatty acid esters extractable from the surface of larvae, called brood pheromone, release multiple colony-level and individual foraging behaviors increasing pollen intake. In this study pollen forager turnaround time was measured in observation hives supplemented with brood pheromone versus a blank control treatment. Treatment with brood pheromone significantly decreased pollen forager turnaround time in the hive between foraging bouts by approximately 72%. Concurrently, brood pheromone increased the ratio of pollen to non-pollen foragers entering colonies. Brood pheromone has been shown to release most of the mechanisms known to increase pollen intake by colonies acting as an important regulator of colony foraging decisions and growth.
KEY WORDS: honey bee - brood pheromone - pollen foraging


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Tanya Pankiw
Email: tpankiw@tamu.edu

References secured to subscribers.

I wonder if I can extract the pheromone from drone brood and add it to my pollen patties and or pollen substitutes?
What do you keepers of the bees think about the above application?

Ernie
Lucas Apiaries

[RDY-B]

We find that brood pheromone is what inhibits laying workers -we also find that drone brood will not inhibit laying workers -so there must be difference in the pheromones of worker versus drone brood why do you want to use drone brood? Do you think there is a difference-will superbost inhibit laying worker or do they use pheromone from synthetic drone -RDY-B

[BEES4U]

Just for economics as it can be readiliy available
Ernie

[Jim Fischer]

This is the work that led to the "SuperBoost" product, claimed to
increase foraging (and hence pollination).

You can search archives both here and over at Bee-L for my
views on this stuff, but long story short, it seems to me to be
a risky proposition for the hive, causing some percentage of bees
to take up foraging earlier, with a resulting drop-off in colony population
due to a lower number of house bees to raise brood (earlier foraging
means less total house bees, assuming a constant laying rate).

The researchers who came up with this product have no idea what
the long-term impact of using this product will be, and given the
impact on basic bee "maturation", I'd hesitate to use it more than
once per season per hive until there is a significant body of data
to prove it harmless. (The problem here is that if you use it once,
the pollinating you do AFTER that may suffer due to a lower forager
population due to "burn out" when the Superboost is used.)

Another problem with this stuff is that it is claimed to make each hive
more "productive", and beekeepers are paid BY THE HIVE. :confused:

Yet another problem with this stuff is that it encourages bees to
collect more pollen, which is a very different mission from
spreading around pollen.