The honey bee (Apis mellifera) alcohol model is widely used to study the effects of alcohol on learning and behavior. Bees are complex social organisms, making them an ideal subject for experiments on group behavior. Traditionally, when experimenting with alcohol, researchers use feeding method. An alternative method of honey bee ethanol exposure is through vapor inhalation. This experiment is the first to provide baseline data, which was used to create a dose-response curve for the vapor ethanol delivery method. A total of 773 bees from Puerto Rico (n = 182) and Oklahoma (2019 OK n= 316 and 2020 OK n= 275) were used in an experiment comparing the traditional feeding method to the new vapor ethanol method. Honey bee hemolymph samples were collected and analyzed using gas chromatography (GC) analysis. The hemolymph levels were used to create a dose-response curve, which provides researchers with information about how much ethanol the bee metabolized when the vapor delivery method was used. Overall, vapor bees had significantly higher ethanol hemolymph levels compared to the feeding bees. This indicates that the vapor bees metabolized more ethanol than the feeding bees. For the majority of the feeding and vapor ethanol exposure and blood draw time groups the ethanol hemolymph levels increased as the ethanol exposure levels rose. This suggests that for both exposure methods bees that were exposed to higher levels of ethanol metabolized more ethanol compared to bees that were exposed to lower levels of ethanol. The results from all three samples provide evidence that the vapor exposure method has promise for use in future experiments once specific dosage information is determined.
Kiri Li N. Stauch (Tue,) studied this question.