Colony Size, Rather Than Geographic Origin of Stocks, Predicts Overwintering Success in Honey Bees (Hymenoptera: Apidae) in the Northeastern United States

Döke, Mehmet Ali; McGrady, C. M.; Otieno, Mark; Grozinger, Christina M.; Frazier, Maryann

doi:10.1093/jee/toy377

Cited by 38 publications

(30 citation statements)

References 42 publications

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“…These traits make honey bee foraging responsive to daily and seasonal turnover of floral resources within a given landscape Seeley 1982, Couvillon et al 2014b) and adaptable to the floristic variation across landscapes ranging from deserts to rainforests in every continent but Antarctica. Nevertheless, honey bee fitness responds to landscape composition (Lecocq et al 2015, Sponsler and Johnson 2015, Döke et al 2018, indicating that behavioral sophistication cannot fully compensate for variation in landscape-scale floral resource availability. This inference is corroborated by empirical and theoretical studies demonstrating that the adaptive value of the waggle dance-the pinnacle of honey bee foraging sophistication-varies with the spatiotemporal distribution of floral resources (Donaldson-Matasci andDornhaus 2012, Schürch andGrüter 2014).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Honey bee pollen foraging ecology across an urbanization gradient

Richardson

Lin

et al. 2019

Preprint

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Understanding animal foraging ecology requires large samples sizes spanning broad environmental and temporal gradients. For pollinators, this has been hampered by the laborious nature of morphologically identifying pollen. Metagenetic pollen analysis is a solution to this issue, but the field has struggled with poor quantitative performance. Building upon prior laboratory and bioinformatic methods, we applied quantitative multi-locus metabarcoding to characterize the foraging ecology of honey bee colonies situated along an urban-agricultural gradient in central Ohio, USA. In cross-validating a subset of our metabarcoding results using microscopic palynology, we find strong concordance between the molecular and microscopic methods. Our results show that, relative to the agricultural environment, urban and suburban environments were associated with higher taxonomic diversity and temporal turnover of honey bee pollen forage. This is likely reflective of the fine-grain heterogeneity and high beta diversity of urban floral landscapes at the scale of honey bee foraging. Our work also demonstrates the power of honey bees as environmental samplers of floral community composition at large spatial scales, aiding in the distinction of taxa characteristically associated with urban or agricultural land use from those distributed ubiquitously across our landscape gradient.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Honey bee pollen foraging ecology across an urbanization gradient

Richardson

Lin

et al. 2019

Preprint

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“…This would mean larger colonies are not more resilient against AFB and will decrease in size stronger than smaller ones. Smaller colonies have lower expected overwintering survival [65] which could lead to an additional colony loss in the next spring.…”

Section: Table 2 Posterior Distributions For the Main Parameters On Omentioning

confidence: 99%

American foulbrood in a honeybee colony: spore-symptom relationship and feedbacks between disease and colony development

2020

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Background: The most severe bacterial disease of honeybees is American foulbrood (AFB). The epidemiology of AFB is driven by the extreme spore resilience, the difficulty of bees to remove these spores, and the considerable incidence of undetected spore-producing colonies. The honeybee collective defence mechanisms and their feedback on colony development, which involves a division of labour at multiple levels of colony organization, are difficult to model. To better predict disease outbreaks we need to understand the feedback between colony development and disease progression within the colony. We therefore developed Bayesian models with data from forty AFB-diseased colonies monitored over an entire foraging season to (i) investigate the relationship between spore production and symptoms, (ii) disentangle the feedback loops between AFB epidemiology and natural colony development, and (iii) discuss whether larger insect societies promote or limit within-colony disease transmission. Results: Rather than identifying a fixed spore count threshold for clinical symptoms, we estimated the probabilities around the relationship between spore counts and symptoms, taking into account modulators such as brood amount/number of bees and time post infection. We identified a decrease over time in the bees-to-brood ratio related to disease development, which should ultimately induce colony collapse. Lastly, two contrasting theories predict that larger colonies could promote either higher (classical epidemiological SIR-model) or lower (increasing spatial nest segregation and more effective pathogen removal) disease prevalence. Conclusions: AFB followed the predictions of the SIR-model, partly because disease prevalence and brood removal are decoupled, with worker bees acting more as disease vectors, infecting new brood, than as agents of social immunity, by removing infected brood. We therefore established a direct link between disease prevalence and social group size for a eusocial insect. We furthermore provide a probabilistic description of the relationship between AFB spore counts and symptoms, and how disease development and colony strength over a season modulate this relationship. These results help to better understand disease development within honeybee colonies, provide important estimates for further epidemiological modelling, and gained important insights into the optimal sampling strategy for practical beekeeping and honeybee research.

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“…Döke et al [27] claimed that overwintering success of colonies is influenced by the weight and population size reached by the colonies before winter rather than by their geographical origin. However, location determines apiary management style, and it can be of great importance to the colonies' survival.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Honey Bee Queen Replacement: An Analysis of Changes in the Preferences of Polish Beekeepers through Decades

Bieńkowska¹,

Łoś²,

Węgrzynowicz³

2020

Insects

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We conducted a survey on honey bee (Apis mellifera) queen management. Data were collected every year from 1980 to 2018. In total, 2964 questionnaires were collected from all over Poland. We examined the trends by decade timeslot, apiary size, and geographical location. Regardless of the decade and the size of the apiary, on average, above 90% of Polish beekeepers replace old queens with new ones in their colonies. In general, during the observed period, beekeepers replaced almost 52% of their queens, 21% of which were purchased. In the last decade, there was an upward trend in the percentage of beekeepers replacing queens throughout the country. The involvement of purchased queens in colony management is associated with the size of the apiary, and it significantly grows with the number of colonies in the apiary. The percentage of purchased queens went up in all the voivodeships over time. Research and education in this area are needed in order to track the trends and further improve Polish beekeepers’ practices.

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Colony Size, Rather Than Geographic Origin of Stocks, Predicts Overwintering Success in Honey Bees (Hymenoptera: Apidae) in the Northeastern United States

Cited by 38 publications

References 42 publications

Honey bee pollen foraging ecology across an urbanization gradient

Honey bee pollen foraging ecology across an urbanization gradient

American foulbrood in a honeybee colony: spore-symptom relationship and feedbacks between disease and colony development

Honey Bee Queen Replacement: An Analysis of Changes in the Preferences of Polish Beekeepers through Decades

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