![]() ![]() Other research has focused on drone pesticide exposure during larval development 14, but generally, little is known about how adult drones’ tolerance to abiotic stressors and their stress-mitigating responses compare to workers. 3), the sterile female caste.Įxisting research has shown that adult drone exposure of some pesticides 4– 9 and extreme temperatures 10– 13 negatively impact drone fertility. 2), as the vast majority of existing studies have focused on workers (reviewed in Chmiel et al. Despite being critical players in honey bee reproduction, factors affecting drone quality are generally understudied (reviewed recently by Rangel et al. High quality male honey bees ( Apis mellifera drones) are essential for supporting adequate mating of queens, whose longevity depends on the number and quality of sperm acquired during nuptial flights 1. 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. Contrary to our hypothesis, we show that drones express surprisingly high baseline levels of putative stress response proteins relative to workers. 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. ![]() We corroborated this lack of cocktail toxicity with in-hive exposures via pollen feeding. 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. Here, we investigated sex biases in susceptibility to abiotic stressors (cold stress, topical imidacloprid exposure, and topical exposure to a realistic cocktail of pesticides). Yet, our understanding of how stressors affect adult drone fertility, survival, and physiology is presently limited. ![]() 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. ![]()
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