New Zealand’s temperate climate and bountiful flora are well suited to managed honey bees, and its geographic isolation and strict biosecurity laws have made sure that some pests and diseases affecting bees elsewhere are not present. Nevertheless, given the importance of pollination and high-value export honey to the economy, New Zealand began systematically measuring winter colony losses in 2015. The New Zealand Colony Loss Survey is modelled on the COLOSS survey but has been adapted to the New Zealand apicultural context. Some 49% of New Zealand beekeepers completed the winter 2021 survey. Between 2015 and 2021, overall colony loss rates increased monotonically from 8.37% [95% CI: 7.66%, 9.15%] to 13.59% [95% CI: 13.21%, 13.99%]. Whereas beekeepers most commonly attributed losses to queen problems between 2015 and 2020, attributions to varroa have escalated year-on-year to become the largest attributed cause of colony loss. Losses to varroa are perhaps amplified by the 23.4% of respondents who did not monitor mite loads and the 4.4% of beekeepers who did not treat varroa during the 2020/21 season. Indeed, most beekeepers consider their treatment to be effective and note that treating at the wrong time and reinvasion were major drivers of losses to varroa.
In New Zealand, the introduced honey bee (Apis mellifera) is a valuable production animal, providing pollination services for horticultural crops and significant export volumes of honey, especially m anuka honey. Honey bees in New Zealand are free from a number of significant diseases and pests such as European foulbrood, acarine disease, small hive beetle, Israeli acute paralysis virus and tropilaelaps mites. We sought to determine the health status of honey bees in New Zealand using a longitudinal study that followed 60 beekeepers over 2.5 years, ascertaining disease and pest status in their elected study apiary and interviewing them every spring and autumn. Participant beekeepers accounted for the management of approximately 12% of the beehives registered in New Zealand. Differences in beekeeping practices were observed between the North Island and the South Island. Nosema ceranae was found almost exclusively on the North Island and did not displace Nosema apis over the course of the study. Lotmaria passim showed a reverse-phase seasonality to nosema, peaking in autumn at near 100% prevalence. The prevalence of Varroa in apiaries varied seasonally between 45.0% and 46.7% in spring and between 65.0% and 69.5% in autumn, with most infestation rates below 3 mites per 100 bees. The detection rate of symptomatic American foulbrood disease during our hive inspections was very low, between 0.00% and 0.85% hive-level prevalence dependent on the season. This study sets a foundation for understanding honey bee health in New Zealand.
New Zealand is a remote country in the South Pacific Ocean. The isolation and relatively late arrival of humans into New Zealand has meant there is a recorded history of the introduction of domestic species. Honey bees (Apis mellifera) were introduced to New Zealand in 1839, and the disease American foulbrood was subsequently found in the 1870s. Paenibacillus larvae, the causative agent of American foulbrood, has been genome sequenced in other countries. We sequenced the genomes of P. larvae obtained from 164 New Zealand apiaries where American foulbrood was identified in symptomatic hives during visual inspection. Multi-locus sequencing typing (MLST) revealed the dominant sequence type to be ST18, with this clonal cluster accounting for 90.2% of isolates. Only two other sequence types (with variants) were identified, ST5 and ST23. ST23 was only observed in the Otago area, whereas ST5 was limited to two geographically non-contiguous areas. The sequence types are all from the enterobacterial repetitive intergenic consensus I (ERIC I) genogroup. The ST18 and ST5 from New Zealand and international P. larvae all clustered by sequence type. Based on core genome MLST and SNP analysis, localized regional clusters were observed within New Zealand, but some closely related genomes were also geographically dispersed, presumably due to hive movements by beekeepers.
The demand for honey and pollination services has continued to grow in many countries worldwide, including New Zealand. This has influenced changes in the demographics of the managed population of honey bees (Apis mellifera). We examined historical data to describe how the apicultural demographics in New Zealand have changed temporally and geographically in the four decades to 2020. We also describe trends in honey production and the economic value of pure honey exported from New Zealand between 2000 and 2020. Our findings suggest that commercial apiculture has been key to the intensification of beekeeping in New Zealand during the study period. This is supported by evidence showing pronounced expansion of beekeeping operations among those with more than 1,000 colonies. The intensification has resulted in the density of apiaries increasing threefold across New Zealand during the four decades. While higher numbers of colonies per area produced higher volumes of honey, there was no corresponding improvement in production efficiency. Honey yields per apiary or colony, as indicators of production efficiency, appear to decline from the mid-2000s. The volume of pure honey export increased over 40-fold, a magnitude approximately ten times higher than that of production increase. This reflects a substantial increase in returns from honey exports, mostly driven by the price of mānuka honey. Our findings add to a pool of information to support evidence-based decision making to enhance honey bee health and develop the apicultural industry in New Zealand.
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