Evolution & Behavior
Honey bees are extremely important pollinators. Understanding the way bees manage infections can help us protect them.
Honey bees are important pollinators. However, like us, they can become hosts to many pathogens. As a social species living in enormous colonies, honey bees have evolved many behavioral defenses to deal with disease, for example changes in social contact. However, as new pathogens continue to arise, some have the potential to subvert these defenses for their own benefit.
Declines in honey bee health have been attributed to multiple interacting environmental stressors; among the most important are forage/nutrition deficits and parasites and pathogens. Recent studies suggest poor honey bee nutrition can exacerbate the negative impacts of infectious viral and fungal diseases, and conversely, that common honey bee parasites and pathogens can adversely affect bee nutritional physiology. This sets up the potential for harmful feedbacks between poor nutrition and infectious disease that may contribute to spiraling declines in bee health. We suggest that improving bees’ nutritional resilience should be a major goal in combating challenges to bee health; this approach can buffer bees from other environmental stressors such as pathogen infection.
Dolezal is a broadly trained insect physiologist with interest in how environmental stressors interact to affect bee health. Pollinators, particularly honey bees and wild bees, are a critical element of healthy ecosystems and key players in agriculture. Dolezal’s research interests revolve around studying how ecological stressors, like nutrition, landscape composition/ecology, viral pathogens, and sublethal pesticide exposure interact to affect these pollinators. Working mostly in Midwestern agroecosystems dominated by row crop agriculture, his lab uses of a variety of approaches, including landscape ecology, ethology, physiology, and genomics to study these interactions and better understand how field-relevant stressors contribute to bee declines.