Busy bees

by Allan Johnson

Published: Mar 31

The problem
THERE’S AN OLD urban myth that scientists don’t know how bees fly, that their wings can’t beat fast enough to keep the bees in the air. In reality, bees beat their wings 200–300 times a second, courtesy of the most efficient metabolic rate in nature. This ultra-efficient energy use makes them the ideal creature for studying the workhorse of biological systems: the metabolism.
This system breaks down large energy storing molecules via a series of chemical reactions, each assisted by enzymes. This creates ATP, the energy-carrying molecule that provides power to all the other functions in the body. The general pathways of this process are common to all higher organisms, so what’s true for bees is true for the animal kingdom.

The researcher
University of Ottawa professor Charles Darveau studies metabolism from a physiological and evolutionary perspective, using bees as a model organism. By comparing metabolic differences across different species of bees and weighing them with physiological differences, he can identify which changes in the series of reactions that make up bees’ metabolisms are important.

The project
Most people are familiar with the honeybee and bumblebee, but there are over 300 species of bees in Ontario alone. Darveau has a wide array of species to make comparisons. In addition to this cross-species approach, he can also look at variations within a species to examine these changes. The goal is to develop a complete characterization of the metabolic process: which enzymes make key changes, what steps bottleneck the metabolic rate, and what kind of system is most favoured evolutionarily.

The key
Darveau’s research is on the fundamentals of physiological change, but it has a number of immediate consequences. Because bees burn energy so quickly and efficiently, their wing muscles can heat up to 40°C. This allows them to flourish in environments where many other pollinators would be unable to survive, making bees an important part of northern ecosystems. Darveau’s fundamental characterization also allows other researchers to determine which species have metabolisms suited to adapting to different conditions, vital in determining the impact of climate change on fauna.