NUTRITION OF LARVAE 

> Larvae of honey bees are fed a special food. Several intensive reviews of analyses of this food are available (3, 9, 46, 55, 56, 94, 95, 113) and interested readers are referred to these sources. It may be stated here that this food supplies all the necessary materials for complete development of all three castes of honey bee larvae.  Young (newly hatched to 2.5 days old) larvae are always surrounded by, or even float on an excessive amount of food material which is uniformly grayish-white and of pastel ike consistency (worker jelly) . Although a certain amount of penetration of dissolved substances may take place through the body wall (l05), the amount absorbed is very small and is not enough to account for increase in the weight of larvae. The food consumed by larvae is the most important factor. Young worker larvae receive, as do queen larvae, two different food components-waterclear and milky-white, the proportion being about 3:1 or 4 :1. Only worker larvae from which emergency queens are reared receive the food components in a 1:1 proportion (57). The number of feedings is considerably fewer than in the case of queen larvae, only 143, lasting 1 hour, 50 minutes for the whole larval period (62). 

> Older (over 3 days old) larvae receive, in addition to the clear secretion, a yellowish, pollen-containing food (modified worker jelly). Feeding with the white secretion is seldom observed. The ages of the nurses feeding young and older worker larvae do not show any significant differences, being, on an average, about 11 to 13 days (57). 

> The significance of the addition of pollen to the modified worker jelly is not known. Pollen does not supply more than about one tenth of the N requirement of larvae (103). Furthermore, pollen is not an essential constituent of the food of worker larvae because normal colonies, deprived of pollen for a short period of time, can rear worker brood if given only sugar solution (30), or when fed a number of pollen substitutes (36). 

> Pollen grains are probably incorporated into modified worker jelly when the nurses add to it the sugary material from the honey stomach. This material could be contaminated with pollen grains (103). However, royal jelly, although containing an admixture of honey from the honey stomach, shows only traces of pollen (105) and older drone larvae usually have considerably more pollen in their food than worker larvae of the same age. Nurse bees apparently recognize the sex (39) and the caste (120) of larvae and may exercise some choice in feeding pollen to larvae of different castes. 


MYKOLA H. HAYDAK. 1970. HONEY BEE NUTRITION

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