Drone Honey Bees (Apis Mellifera) are Disproportionately Sensitive to Abiotic Stressors Despite Expressing High Levels of Stress Response Proteins

Drone honey bees are the obligate sexual partners of queens, and the availability of healthy, high-quality drones directly affects a queen9s fecundity and productivity of her subsequent colony. Yet, our understanding of how stressors affect drone fecundity and physiology is presently limited. Like other male Hymenopterans, drones are haploid and are thus expected to be more sensitive to stressors than workers, as suggested by the haploid susceptibility hypothesis. We investigated sex biases in susceptibility to abiotic stressors (cold stress, topical imidacloprid exposure, and topical exposure to a cocktail of pesticides found in wax), and we found that drones were more sensitive to cold and imidacloprid exposure but the cocktail was not toxic at the concentrations tested. We corroborated this lack of apparent toxicity with in-hive cocktail exposures via pollen feeding, where we did not observe any consistent effect of treatment on drones during development or adulthood. Finally, we used quantitative proteomics to investigate protein expression profiles in the hemolymph of topically exposed workers and drones, and we show that drones express surprisingly high levels of putative stress response proteins relative to workers. These findings show that drones invest in strong constitutive expression of damage-mitigating proteins for a wide range of stressors, yet they are still sensitive to stress when challenged. The robust expression of proteins involved in stress responses in drones suggests that drone stress tolerance systems are fundamentally rewired relative to workers, and their susceptibility to stress depends on more than simply gene dose or deleterious recessive alleles.