Effects of sugar and honey solution on honey bee ( Apis mellifera L.) nutrition and physiology

Honey bees require significant quantities of simple carbohydrates for various colony activities such as thermoregulation, humidity control, and flight. This study investigates the impact of different sugar and honey solutions on caged honey bee physiology and behavior. For this purpose, we provided solutions (66 °Brix) of three commercial sugars (sucrose, fructose, and glucose) and two local honeys formulated with titanium dioxide (0.1 % w/w) as an inert marker for digestibility studies to newly emerged honey bees. We assessed water consumption, carbohydrate consumption and mobilization, and apparent digestibility of these feeds as well as bee mortality and body part weight in two in vitro trials. Results indicated no significant differences in water and carbohydrate consumption or mortality across treatments. Glucose solution showed lower mobilization in contrast to fructose and sucrose solutions. Additionally, honey solutions demonstrated lower mobilization compared to sucrose solution Body part weight did not vary with carbohydrate type, except with the bees fed with glucose having lighter thoraxes. Apparent digestibility values were higher than 92.92 % in all solutions, indicating that they were successfully utilized by bees, enabling the application of this technique in more nutritional complex feeds such as bee pollen. Glucose solution showed slightly lower digestibility values than the other two pure sugar solutions, while sucrose solution presented higher values than the honey solutions. This study enhances our understanding of carbohydrate physiology in worker honey bees.