Management practices and honey bee stress: Effects of migratory beekeeping on longevity and oxidative stress

Given current health issues plaguing honey bees, understanding the effects of possible stressors at the individual, cellular, and molecular levels are of increasing importance. Stress and aging are often highly related. Honey bees are an excellent model to simultaneously investigate this relationship between stress and longevity, as well as how it impacts both individual- and group-level phenotypes.  The aim of this study was to determine potential effects migratory beekeeping practices might have on levels of oxidative stress in individual honey bees and subsequent effects on lifespan. Foragers and in-hive bees were collected at known ages to quantify cellular and molecular measures of oxidative stress from two different sets of colonies: 1) “stationary colonies” maintained at one agricultural site and 2) “migratory colonies” that were moved every 21 days to different agricultural landscapes for 3 months. Another subset of bees were used to assess any effects on individual lifespan in laboratory conditions. Our findings indicate that bees collected from “migratory” hives have slightly but significantly shorter lifespans on average than bees from stationary hives. Results will also be presented on measures of oxidative stress, including DNA damage, lipid peroxidation, and protein oxidation.