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Ethanol dependency affects the health of more than 15 million adults in the United States of America. Honey bees have been used as a model for ethanol studies because of similarities in neural structure to vertebrates and their complex social behaviors. This study compares honey bee free-flight visitation to a food source after exposure to ethanol in aqueous sucrose. Individual bees were followed making six attachment visits to a test-station containing 1M sucrose. After attachment, honey bees were randomly assigned to one of five groups: 0%, 2.5%, 5%, 10% EtOH, or a staged increase in ethanol concentrations (2.5%, 5%, 10%). The results indicated that honey bees tolerate up to 2.5% EtOH without avoidance or altered behavior, and up to 5% EtOH without avoidance but with slower trips. At 10% ethanol, attrition was 75% by the 18th return trip. Bees in the staged increase in concentration group were more likely to return than bees that were offered 10% ethanol in sucrose solution after attachment. The results of this study imply that ethanol-induced tolerance to the effects of ethanol can be achieved in honey bees through incremental increase in EtOH but only in terms of attrition. Other measures of foraging efficiency did not show ethanol-induced tolerance. Understanding how ethanol tolerance develops in bees may provide insight into these processes in humans with minimized ethical considerations.
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Quantitative Analysis of Honey Bee Blood-Ethanol Levels Following Exposure to Ethanol Vapors
The use of invertebrate models has allowed researchers to examine the mechanisms behind alcoholism and its effects with a cost-effective system. In that respect, the honey bee is an ideal model species to study the effects of ethanol (EtOH) due to the behavioral and physiological similarities of honey bees with humans when alcohol is consumed. Although both ingestion and inhalation methods are used to dose subjects in insect EtOH model systems, there is little literature on the use of the EtOH vapor-exposure method for experiments using honey bees. The experiment presented here provides baseline data for a dose EtOH-hemolymph response curve when using EtOH vapor-inhalation dosing with honey bees (Apis mellifera). Bees were exposed to EtOH vapors for 0, 1, 2.5, or 5 min, and hemolymph was collected 1 min post EtOH exposure. Hemolymph samples were analyzed using gas chromatography (GC) for hemolymph EtOH concentration. The ethanol-hemolymph level of the bees increased linearly with exposure time. The results provide a dosing guide for hemolymph EtOH level in the honey bee model ethanol-inhalation system, and thus makes the honey bee model more robust.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1950805
- PAR ID:
- 10593190
- Publisher / Repository:
- University of California eScholarship
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- International Journal of Comparative Psychology
- Volume:
- 38
- Issue:
- 1
- ISSN:
- 2168-3344
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.46867/ijcp.25002
