A pan-European epidemiological study reveals honey bee colony survival depends on beekeeper education and disease control

Abstract

Reports of honey bee population decline has spurred many national efforts to understand the extent of the problem and to identify causative or associated factors. However, our collective understanding of the factors has been hampered by a lack of joined up trans-national effort. Moreover, the impacts of beekeeper knowledge and beekeeping management practices have often been overlooked, despite honey bees being a managed pollinator. Here, we established a standardised active monitoring network for 5 798 apiaries over two consecutive years to quantify honey bee colony mortality across 17 European countries. Our data demonstrate that overwinter losses ranged between 2% and 32%, and that high summer losses were likely to follow high winter losses. Multivariate Poisson regression models revealed that hobbyist beekeepers with small apiaries and little experience in beekeeping had double the winter mortality rate when compared to professional beekeepers. Furthermore, honey bees kept by professional beekeepers never showed signs of disease, unlike apiaries from hobbyist beekeepers that had symptoms of bacterial infection and heavy Varroa infestation. Our data highlight beekeeper background and apicultural practices as major drivers of honey bee colony losses. The benefits of conducting trans-national monitoring schemes and improving beekeeper training are discussed.

Citizen science in developing countries: how to improve volunteer participation

“…) and the EPILOBEE consortium (Jacques et al . ) – programs that were developed in the US and Europe, respectively (for more details see WebPanel 2). We adapted the questions to account for differences in Northern and Southern Hemisphere seasonal phenology, types of diseases, and botanical origins of honey (in order to make the questionnaire more compatible with South American biogeographic conditions), and prepared a Spanish translation.…”

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“…In the last decades, managed honey bees faced a widespread decline in Europe as reported in large national and European bee monitoring projects (Genersch et al, 2010;Jacques et al, 2016Jacques et al, , 2017Odoux et al, 2014;Porrini et al, 2016;van Der Zee et al, 2014). The causes that influence honey bee colony health are multiple (Goulson et al, 2015;) and may be subdivided into 5 categories: (1) chemical exposure (Böhme et al, 2017); (2) diseases and biological agents (Higes et al, 2009); (3) change in land use and landscape fragmentation ; (4) climate change and variability ; (5) beekeeping practices (Jacques et al, 2017).…”

“…The causes that influence honey bee colony health are multiple (Goulson et al, 2015;) and may be subdivided into 5 categories: (1) chemical exposure (Böhme et al, 2017); (2) diseases and biological agents (Higes et al, 2009); (3) change in land use and landscape fragmentation ; (4) climate change and variability ; (5) beekeeping practices (Jacques et al, 2017).…”

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“…The authors found that colony loss was highly variable across the 17 countries surveyed. Over the two-year study period, annual losses ranged from 2.6-36% and it was observed that high summer loss were associated with high winter loss (Laurent et al 2016, Jacques et al 2017. In 2014-2015, Seitz et al (2016) reported annual honey bee mortality rates to range from 14-63% across the United States.…”