A study conducted has found out that overuse of antibiotics is bad for humans and bees alike. Researchers from The University of Texas at Austin have done an experiment using honey bees and common antibiotics.
Most of the honeybees that were treated with common antibiotics did not last of a week. Meanwhile, the honeybees that were not treated did last for the whole week. The health implication found will also likely be found in human beings, reported Phys.org. It has made the overuse of antibiotics proven to be bad.
The common antibiotics have cleared out beneficial gut bacteria in the bees. Overuse of antibiotics has made way for the dangerous pathogens to go in. Those pathogens are also found in humans so this occurrence might also happen with human beings. The research team has also found out that the healthy bacteria like the gut microbes decreased fast. Moreover, the increased level of Serratia, a pathogenic bacterium that afflicts humans and other animals, was found in the gut of the treated bees.
That has dramatically decreased the immortality rate of the bees. They do not have as much as the defense like when they have not taken the common antibiotic tetracycline. This discovery is one of the newest findings how overuse of antibiotics has caused people and other living things more harm than good, according to Science Daily.
Additionally, the study will also have a great impact for beekeepers and the agriculture industry. The loss of thousands of bees decades ago that affected pollinating of crops might have been because of the overuse of antibiotics, explained the UT Austin team, led by professor Nancy Moran and postdoctoral researcher Kasie Raymann.
"Our study suggests that perturbing the gut microbiome of honeybees is a factor, perhaps one of many, that could make them more susceptible to declining and to the colony collapsing," Moran said. "Antibiotics may have been an underappreciated factor in colony collapse," she added.
