A new study suggests the honey bee may have some kind of hidden health advantage over other pollinators, which may be the reason the bee is becoming more popular among Americans.
Researchers at UC Davis found that bees have an immunity to the common cold.
Their analysis of the immune response of bees living in the United States found that they are more susceptible to the flu than their northern counterparts.
The bees, like most pollinators in the U.S., have evolved a natural resistance to the virus.
A number of other studies have linked bee immunity to a host of diseases, including Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and other neurodegenerative diseases.
In their study, the scientists found that the honey bees have a much higher level of immunity to both influenza and the common frostbite than their Northern counterparts.
And they also found that these two viruses, as well as other colds and fevers, are able to trigger the immune system in bees, which makes them more vulnerable to new diseases.
They also found a correlation between bees and the development of several new strains of coronavirus, the virus that caused the pandemic in the last several years.
The findings were published online today in the journal Science Advances.
Researchers say this is because honeybees are a much more vulnerable species to infection.
This makes them particularly susceptible to new coronaviruses.
“We think that there are some genes that can trigger this immune response in honeybees,” said lead author David Waddington, an entomologist at UC Santa Cruz.
Waddington and his colleagues studied the immune responses of hundreds of bees from California, Arizona and New Mexico and found that when honeybees were exposed to influenza or frostbite, they had higher levels of immune responses.
They also noted that these responses increased when the bees were in warmer, less humid conditions.
In a second study, they found that in the winter months, honeybees in Arizona and California had a higher percentage of immune cells that could fight off the coronaviral virus.