Honey bee viruses are capable of causing a wide variety of devastating effects, but effective treatments have yet to be discovered. Phytochemicals represent a broad range of substances that honey bees frequently encounter and consume, many of which have been shown to improve honey bee health. However, their effect on bee viruses is largely unknown. Here, we tested the therapeutic effectiveness of carvacrol, thymol, p-coumaric acid, quercetin, and caffeine on viral infection by measuring their ability to improve survivorship in honey bees inoculated with Israeli acute paralysis virus (IAPV) using high-throughput cage bioassays. Among these candidates, caffeine was the only phytochemical capable of significantly improving survivorship, with initial screening showing that naturally occurring concentrations of caffeine (25 ppm) were sufficient to produce an ameliorative effect on IAPV infection. Consequently, we measured the scope of caffeine effectiveness in bees inoculated and uninoculated with IAPV by performing the same type of high-throughput bioassay across a wider range of caffeine concentrations. Our results indicate that caffeine may provide benefits that scale with concentration, though the exact mechanism by which caffeine ingestion improves survivorship remains uncertain. Caffeine therefore has the potential to act as an accessible and inexpensive method of treating viral infections, while also serving as a tool to further understanding of honey bee–virus interactions at a physiological and molecular level.

中文翻译：

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植物化学物质摄入对蜜蜂病毒感染的改善作用

蜜蜂病毒能够引起多种破坏性作用，但是尚未发现有效的治疗方法。植物化学物质代表蜜蜂经常遇到和食用的多种物质，其中许多物质已被证明可以改善蜜蜂的健康。但是，它们对蜂病毒的作用在很大程度上尚不清楚。在这里，我们测试了香芹酚，百里香酚，p的治疗效果香豆酸，槲皮素和咖啡因通过高通量笼式生物测定法测量接种以色列急性麻痹病毒（IAPV）的蜜蜂提高存活率的能力，从而对病毒感染产生影响。在这些候选物中，咖啡因是唯一能够显着改善存活率的植物化学物质，初步筛选显示，天然存在的咖啡因浓度（25 ppm）足以对IAPV感染产生改善作用。因此，我们通过在更广泛的咖啡因浓度范围内执行相同类型的高通量生物测定，来测量接种和未接种IAPV的蜜蜂中咖啡因有效性的范围。我们的结果表明，咖啡因可能会提供与浓度成比例的益处，尽管摄入咖啡因改善存活率的确切机制仍不确定。因此，咖啡因具有潜力，可作为一种廉价且廉价的病毒感染治疗方法，同时还可以作为在生理和分子水平上进一步了解蜜蜂与病毒相互作用的工具。