Linking Measures of Colony and Individual Honey Bee Health to Survival among Apiaries Exposed to Varying Agricultural Land Use
April 26, 2016
From: PLOS One
Matthew Smart, Jeff Pettis, Nathan Rice, Zac Browning, Marla Spivak
Abstract
We previously characterized and quantified the influence of land use on survival and productivity of colonies positioned in six apiaries and found that colonies in apiaries surrounded by more land in uncultivated forage experienced greater annual survival, and generally more honey production. Here, detailed metrics of honey bee health were assessed over three years in colonies positioned in the same six apiaries. The colonies were located in North Dakota during the summer months and were transported to California for almond pollination every winter. Our aim was to identify relationships among measures of colony and individual bee health that impacted and predicted overwintering survival of colonies. We tested the hypothesis that colonies in apiaries surrounded by more favorable land use conditions would experience improved health. We modeled colony and individual bee health indices at a critical time point (autumn, prior to overwintering) and related them to eventual spring survival for California almond pollination. Colony measures that predicted overwintering apiary survival included the amount of pollen collected, brood production, and Varroa destructor mite levels. At the individual bee level, expression of vitellogenin, defensin1, and lysozyme2 were important markers of overwinter survival. This study is a novel first step toward identifying pertinent physiological responses in honey bees that result from their positioning near varying landscape features in intensive agricultural environments.
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Conclusions
Taken together, our results indicate that colonies positioned in apiaries surrounded by the most potential forage collect more pollen and nectar resources over the summer. Such colonies also generally contain more brood and lower Varroa mite infestation rates in the fall, and have a higher overwintering success rate. Individual honey bees within those colonies possess a quantifiably better nutritional status by the end of the foraging season (September). Likely as a result of this higher quality nutritional state, bees in those colonies displayed a less activated immune system, as evidenced by their decreased humoral immune response. Conversely, colonies positioned at sites with the least area in potential bee forage expressed some of the lowest nutritional stores (vitellogenin, insulin-like peptide1, lipids generally) and highest levels of humoral immunity. Importantly, our combined model was consistent with the two separate models of colony and individual bee measures (i.e. the best combined model contained pollen collection, brood, Varroa, and def1). The combined modeling indicated that colony measures were more strongly indicative of apiary survival that those taken from individual bees. Individual bee measures were taken from a fewer number of hives than colony measures, and none of the individual-bee sampled colonies actually died over the winter. These factors likely contributed to this result. We would expect a greater divergence of individual bee physiological indicators to emerge if taken from bees with a more varied colony health background, such as visually weak or diseased autumn colonies.
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