NC State University Insect Museum

Now that the haiku contest is over and the winners have been announced (and my manuscript's finished!) I can get back to reporting on miscellaneous museum news and on interesting stories about insects. One article in particular caught my attention last week, but I never had time to post on it. The Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) team at the Instituto de Apicultura y Biologia de Polinización (IABP) in Trucito, Spain has been working on revealing the causes of CCD (high levels of Israeli acute paralysis virus were found recently that correlate with dying colonies) and also on exploring alternative insect pollinators should the old, reliable Apis mellifera decline to critically low levels over the next decade.

This line of research isn't especially novel, as several other researchers are also tackling alternatives: Osmia and Megachile (Megachilidae) successfully pollinate alfalfa and a variety of fruits and vegetables, Bombus spp. (Apidae) take care of our tomatoes, blueberries, and cranberries, and the USDA has a whole lab dedicated to developing non-Apis bees...as crop pollinators. Very few people, however, are exploring pollinators from other insect orders, or even other hexapod orders. Enter Fábula Cuento, Manojo Mentiras, and their army of grad students...

Most IABP products focus (predictably) on Lepidoptera, with a few students tackling pollination projects involving Diptera and Coleoptera. None of these taxa, though, provide the same level of precision, fidelity, and efficiency in their pollination behaviors as honey bees. And none of these other taxa provide honey, pollen balls, propolis, wax (not in large amounts, anyway), and royal jelly. At least one other taxon does a few of these things, and Rodriguez et al. (2009) and Cuento et al. (2009) report on the successful employment of springtail colonies (Collembola) as substitutes for Apis mellifera.


It's amazing to me that no one has thought of this before. Though most species of springtails are solitary, two lineages - Gregarioistominae (Isotomidae) and Apisminthurini (Sminthuridae) - have been documented as being sub-social. These collembolans live and forage gregariously, similar to honey bees, and actually partition nest duties between individuals via largely unknown mechanisms. These arthropods will even collect pollen, which they pack onto specialized hind leg setal patches (pseudocorbiculae) in order to provision group nests. Gregarious species also have workers that collect nectar (see below), which is fed to "guards" back at the nest by their suckling from the worker's collophore (see tube-like structure at the center of this image).


We're a looooong way off from establishing collembiculture as a popular hobby and undergrad course, but the two springtail species explored by IABP show tremendous promise as honey bee replacements: they don't sting, they're not susceptible to Israeli acute paralysis virus, and they collect pollen and nectar. As this video of pollen-gathering collembolans shows, though, we haven't yet found the perfect replacement for honey bees. Nor are beekeepers seriously considering making the switch to collembolans...yet.