ArticleCommunications biology2022
Drone honey bees are disproportionately sensitive to abiotic stressors despite expressing high levels of stress response proteins.
Article in Communications biology, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 13 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
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Who cites it
13 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 33 citations in OpenAlex.
- Towards Acoustic Bioindicator Integration in AI-Based Wildfire Monitoring: A Systematic Review.Sensors (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Pooled it
- Mycotoxins as an Underestimated Honeybee Stressor: Aflatoxin, Contaminated Pollen, and Colony-Level Risk.Biology · 2026Review
- Impact of Two Common Beekeeper-Applied Chemicals on Honey Bee Queen Fecundity and Gut Microbial Communities.Microbial ecology · 2026Article
- Article
- Conserved and Unique Protein Expression Patterns Across Reproductive Stage Transitions in Social Hymenopteran Queens.Molecular ecology · 2024Article
- Changes in the proteome of Apis mellifera acutely exposed to sublethal dosage of glyphosate and imidacloprid.Environmental science and pollution research international · 2024Article
- Re-using food resources from failed honey bee (Apis mellifera L.) colonies and their impact on colony queen rearing capacity.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Article
- Indirect exposure to insect growth disruptors affects honey bee (Apis mellifera) reproductive behaviors and ovarian protein expression.PloS one · 2023Article
- Acute oral toxicity, apoptosis, and immune response in nurse bees (Frontiers in physiology · 2023Article
- Intra-specific variation in sensitivity of Bombus terrestris and Osmia bicornis to three pesticides.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- Drone honey bees are disproportionately sensitive to abiotic stressors despite expressing high levels of stress response proteins.Communications biology · 2022Article
- Variation in the reproductive quality of honey bee males affects their age of flight attempt.PeerJ · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
5 authors at 2 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
Abstract
Drone honey bees (Apis mellifera) are the obligate sexual partners of queens, and the availability of healthy, high-quality drones directly affects a queen's fertility and productivity. Yet, our understanding of how stressors affect adult drone fertility, survival, and physiology is presently limited. Here, we investigated sex biases in susceptibility to abiotic stressors (cold stress, topical imidacloprid exposure, and topical exposure to a realistic cocktail of pesticides). We found that drones (haploid males) were more sensitive to cold and imidacloprid exposure than workers (sterile, diploid females), but the cocktail was not toxic at the concentrations tested. We corroborated this lack of cocktail toxicity with in-hive exposures via pollen feeding. We then used quantitative proteomics to investigate protein expression profiles in the hemolymph of topically exposed workers and drones, and found that 34 proteins were differentially expressed in exposed drones relative to controls, but none were differentially expressed in exposed workers. Contrary to our hypothesis, we show that drones express surprisingly high baseline levels of putative stress response proteins relative to workers. This suggests that drones' stress tolerance systems are fundamentally rewired relative to workers, and susceptibility to stress depends on more than simply gene dose or allelic diversity.
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Registered trials
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