The Surprising Medicine Hidden in Honeybee Pollen
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The Surprising Medicine Hidden in Honeybee Pollen
Pollen
collected by bees carries good bacteria that naturally
fight infections. Scientists believe these hidden
helpers could lead to safer, more natural ways to
protect hives and crops. Credit: Shutterstock
Researchers found that pollen collected by honeybees is teeming with beneficial bacteria.
Fortress Hives Under Siege
A honeybee hive, packed with pollen, wax, and honey, functions like a heavily guarded vault—well-defended, yet irresistible to any invader able to breach its walls. Scientists have already identified more than 30 different parasites that attack honeybees, including protists, viruses, bacteria, fungi, and arthropods (and that list continues to grow). Because of this constant threat, beekeepers are always searching for new and natural ways to safeguard their colonies.
Researchers in the United States suspected that a promising and environmentally friendly solution might already exist in the bees’ own pollen stores. They proposed that endophytes—beneficial bacteria and fungi that live inside most plants—could have evolved to protect their hosts’ pollinators. If keeping pollinators healthy helps these microbes spread, they might produce natural compounds with antimicrobial properties.
Their recent work confirms this idea.
Beneficial Bacteria Discovered
“We found that the same beneficial bacteria occur in pollen stores of honeybee colonies and on pollen of nearby plants,” said Dr. Daniel May, a faculty member at Washington College in Maryland, US, and the corresponding author of a study in Frontiers in Microbiology.
“We also show that these bacteria produced similar antimicrobial compounds that kill pathogens of bees and plants, making them a great starting point for new treatments of crops and hives.”
Precious Pollen Reservoirs
May and colleagues homed in on bacteria from the phylum actinobacteria, the source of two-thirds of the antibiotics currently in clinical use. Between April and June 2021, they collected pollen from 10 native plant species in the Lakeshore Nature Preserve at the University of Wisconsin – Madison. They also collected pollen from the stores of a nearby honeybee hive.
The authors isolated 16 strains of actinobacteria from plants, and 18 strains from pollen stores inside the hive. DNA barcoding and genome sequencing revealed that the same or closely related species occurred in both types of samples. The majority (72%) belonged to the genus Streptomyces, the source of many compounds used in medicine and agriculture, for example as antibiotics or as anticancer and antiparasitic drugs. Some of the closest relatives of the Streptomyces species found here are currently under study elsewhere as potential sources of compounds against diseases of crop plants.
The authors then conducted ‘competition assays’, where known pathogens were grown together with the Streptomyces isolated here. Nearly all of these proved to be effective inhibitors of the mold Aspergillus niger, which can cause a honeybee disease called stonebrood. Individual strains also proved moderately to strongly active against two bacterial pathogens of honeybees, Paenibacillus larvae and Serratia marcescens, and against three pathogens of crops, Erwinia amylavora, Pseudomonas syringae, and Ralstonia solanaceum.
‘Whisked Back to the Hive’
The results confirmed that a great variety of interesting bioactive compounds remain to be discovered in endophytes, many of which could help us to keep honeybees healthy. They also suggest that a landscape rich in plant species is beneficial for bees, as it ensures a greater diversity of actinobacterial endophytes available to them.