A new design of bee cage for laboratory experiments: nutritional assessment of supplemental diets in honey bees (Apis mellifera)

We designed a cage that can maintain adult bees for 21 days with about 90% survival rate, in addition to facilitating the changing of sucrose syrup and beebread, collection live dead without disturbing or releasing bees. The consumption rates bee pollen diet groups 50–200 honey were recorded after emergence. consumed mainly at age 1–9 days. Regular was observed among all throughout Furthermore, nutritional responses nurse bees—specifically, expressions major royal jelly protein 1 (mrjp1) head vitellogenin (vg) abdomen—upon provision five single-supplemental diets evaluated. aimed improve usability cages by elucidating food relationship between gene expression ingestion each single-protein diet.