> Scenario 1:  A moderate pollen income dwindles slowly. This scenario would be typical in my area in late summer.  In this case, the colony lives “hand-to-mouth,” consuming each day’s pollen income, and is unable to store reserves of beebread.  The nurses restrict broodrearing and jelly production to match pollen income, in some cases feeding less than the optimal amount of jelly to the larvae.  Those larvae would then up- or downregulate genes to make them “survivors.”  But they would not be Vg-rich diutinus bees, due to lack of pollen resources.  A colony consisting of such bees fares very poorly during the winter (personal observations).


From: "The Regulatory Anatomy of Honeybee Lifespan"
GroVang Amdam and StigW. Omholt*
Department of Animal Science, Agricultural University of Norway, P.O. Box 5025, 1432 Aas, Norway
(Received on 1 March 2001, Accepted in revised form on 20 January 2002):

"Except for workers having been foragers for many days, our results also suggest that the previous life histories of workers do not constrain them from becoming winter bees as long as they get ample food and time to build up their protein reserves before wintering."


From: "BEE NUTRITION AND POLLEN SUBSTITUTES", Prof. M. HAYDAK
Paper no. 1232: Miscellanoeus Journal Serie, Minnesota Agricultural Experiment Station, University of Minnesota, St. Paul, Minnesota 55101.
 
"... This demonstrates the importance of pollen in the life of bees and also the fact that emerging bees which had lived for an extended period of time on pure carbohydrate diet can increase their weight and the nitrogen content to normal levels and can rear brood normally. This fact is very important biologically, since such pollen starvation of emerging bees may occur in a normal colony during the winter or in other periods of pollen shortage. Such bees, after receiving supply of pollen will become useful members of the bee colony."



Randy, could a supplementation of protein patties restore the condition you describe above in the sense indicated by Amdam and Omholt? Anyway, according to Haydak such bees seem not lost to the colony?
Didn't you meet this circumstance in your comparative tests of pollen subs.

Thanks for helping to understand this really fascinating thread, kind regards,

Ghislain De Roeck,
Belgium.

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