A Good Diet:... Is More Than Tasty Tood

摘要

A good diet is about more than just good food. La-sagna might be your favorite meal in the world, but after a week straight of eating it you'd start to feel a little sick. And few can survive on fiber bars and nutritional smoothies alone. Life is about sampling flavors, and human beings aren't the only animals who understand that a balanced breakfast means variety. Honey bees may pollinate the food that ends up on our table, but how often do we think about what we're feeding them?The importance of pollen diversity in colony health has been the subject of discussion for decades now, with most feeling that higher diversity must be for the best, according to common sense. But the science is nowhere near so straightforward. Restricting bees' access to only particular types of pollen usually requires confining small groups of bees in the laboratory, and the disconnect between field studies of floral diversity and cage studies of bee survival is large enough that it can be hard to make the leap. Garance Di Pasquale is one of the researchers looking to build a bridge, although her studies remain primarily in the lab. In two consecutive papers, one published in 2013 and the other in 2016, she and her co-authors claimed that pollen diversity doesn't seem to be that big of a boost. Rather, it's quality and quantity that improve worker bees' survival and ability to feed their brood. But what is it about pollen that's so important in the first place?