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Lookup NU author(s): Dr Eileen Power, Dr Giorgia Perri
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0).
© 2026 The Author(s). Bees and flowering plants have co-evolved as mutualists. In this relationship, bees facilitate genetic outcrossing for plants, and in return, they collect and eat floral nectar and pollen. Nectar is produced as a reward for pollinators, but pollen is not: it is the plant’s male gamete. While we expect bees to have adapted to use pollen as their main source of essential amino acids (EAAs), we know relatively little about nutritional constraints imposed on them by pollinivory. Here, we measured the EAA profiles of pollen, bee bread, honeybees, and royal jelly to understand how natural variation in pollen protein quality impacted bee feeding behavior and performance. Specifically, we tested how mismatches in EAAs relative to bee tissues impacted protein-to-carbohydrate regulation in adult workers. Bees fed diets with an EAA profile that matched their own tissues consumed more food, gained more weight, and ate proportionally more protein relative to carbohydrates, while those fed with pollen sources, including bee bread, ate proportionally less protein and less food overall. Deficiencies found in pollen led us to discover that nutrient balancing for protein and carbohydrate in bees was driven by the inverse relationship between quantities of the branched-chain amino acids relative to histidine in dietary protein. We predict that bees create bee bread, a mixture of pollen, as an adaptation to pollen feeding that reduces the impact of imbalances in the EAA profile of pollen protein.
Author(s): Stabler D, Chennells JA, Power EF, Scott J, Perri G, Donkersley P, Shafir S, Wright GA
Publication type: Article
Publication status: Published
Journal: Current Biology
Year: 2026
Volume: 36
Issue: 13
Pages: 3326-3335.e3
Print publication date: 06/07/2026
Online publication date: 17/06/2026
Acceptance date: 29/05/2026
Date deposited: 15/07/2026
ISSN (print): 0960-9822
ISSN (electronic): 1879-0445
Publisher: Cell Press
URL: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2026.05.070
DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2026.05.070
Data Access Statement: All data presented in the manuscript can be found at https://doi.org/10. 6084/m9.figshare.30112909 This paper does not report original code. Any additional information required to reanalyze the data reported in this paper is available from the lead contact upon request.
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