Thanks Randy. May be my statement was more of a general statement. I should have described it more specifically as been mentioned in the following statement.
“The production of these enzymes strongly depends on the workers’ occupation. While in younger workers (nurses) the hypopharyngeal glands produce mostly proteinaceous jelly, they change their synthesising activity in older workers (foragers) producing mainly carbohydrate digesting enzymes (HALBERSTADT, 1980; KUBO et al., 1996).”
In the same paper when you read through the discussion. The authors mentioned the following.
Since starch is not a main component of hon- eybee nutrition, and only small amounts are ingested by bees via feeding on pollen, the amount of energy derived from starch is undoubtedly not very high under natural con- ditions. Only certain kinds of pollen have rel- atively high starch content – for example, for Zea mays a value of 22.4% is reported (Stanley and Linskens, 1985). Using the average amounts of honey (80 kg) and pollen (20 kg) a typical colony consumes per year (Seeley, 1985), we can calculate that the starch in this pollen (app. 10% of its dry weight) yields an additional amount of 2.0 kg of anhydroglucose, which is the energy equivalent of about 2.6 kg of honey, which is only 3.1% of the total car- bohydrates available (80 + 2.6 kg). Probably this is an over-estimate, as it assumes that all the starch present is digested and absorbed. Furthermore, it is the younger bees that ingest large quantities of pollen, not the older foraging bees (Crailsheim et al., 1992; Hrassnigg and Crailsheim, 1998), but there is little published information about the ability of young bees to digest starch. Our findings indicate that forag- ers have the ability to degrade polysaccharides such as starch, but do not indicate the impor- tance of this food source. Amylase does some- what increase the workers’ energetic efficiency, but might be even more important in the general
I hope this sheds more light on bees ability of digesting starch and availability of starch to them.
Medhat Nasr
***********************************************
The BEE-L mailing list is powered by L-Soft's renowned
LISTSERV(R) list management software. For more information, go to:
http://www.lsoft.com/LISTSERV-powered.html
|
