Source: http://www.wbka.com/news-events/latest-academic-bee-studies/
Timestamp: 2019-04-20 22:27:03+00:00

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Many thanks to the Gwynedd Beekeeping Yahoo mailing group for the heads up.
Wild honey bee colonies—both truly wild (in trees and buildings) and simulated wild (in small hives)—were studied to determine their life-history traits, to see if these traits have changed now that these colonies are infested with Varroa destructor. Most colonies (97%) survive summers, but only 23% of founder (first-year) colonies and 84% of established colonies survive winters. Established colonies have a mean lifespan of 5–6 years and most (87%) have a queen turnover (probably by swarming) each summer. A population model shows that these life-history traits produce a stable population of colonies. Remarkably, the suite of colony life-history traits found in the 2010s (with V. destructor) matches that found in the 1970s (without V. destructor). It seems likely that the wild colonies living near Ithaca, NY, possess defenses against V. destructor that are not costly.
Experiments have shown that sublethal doses of neonicotinoids can interfere with honey bee (Apis mellifera) performance, yet sublethal effects on an individual level may be either enhanced or buffered against at the colony level, and this response to pesticide exposure depends on how it affects worker-worker interactions. We quantified worker interactions in experimental groups to assess the effects of thiacloprid on social network structure established by a group of worker individuals. We also quantified the amount of food exchanged via trophallaxis among worker individuals. Bees were force-fed a “low” dose of 0.17 μg or a “high” dose of 0.80 μg thiacloprid in 20 μl 2.7 M sucrose solution. Bees fed with thiacloprid significantly reduced their network centrality, but they nevertheless exchanged more food to other group members, which resulted in a dilution of the contaminated food. Hence, although thiacloprid may act as a general perturbator of social network structure, it still may play a role in the dynamics of disease transmission in the colony if pathogens are transmitted via food exchange.
To read more on the International Bee Research Association Press release attached original reseach article.
Here, we examined the in vitro effects of co-exposure to a pathogen and a common neonicotinoid on honey bee larvae survival and on adult learning behavior following a standard olfactory conditioning procedure based on the proboscis extension response paradigm. We exposed or co-exposed honey bee larvae to American foulbrood and to sub-lethaldoses of thiamethoxam (chronic exposure). Our results revealed no additive effects between the two stressors on larval mortality. However, the present work provides the first evidence of impaired learning and memory in adult bees that were fed thiamethoxam (0.6 ng/bee) during the larval stage. We also show no alterations in learning and memory in bees after infection with American foulbrood at the larval stage. The present study contributes to our knowledge of the sub-lethal effects of neonicotinoids on honey bee larvae and adults.
Antoine Jacques, Marion Laurent, EPILOBEE Consortium, Magali Ribière-Chabert, Mathilde Saussac, Stéphanie Bougeard, Giles E. Budge, Pascal Hendrikx, Marie-Pierre Chauzat.
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.
Copyright: © 2017 Jacques et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Understanding which flowers honey bees (Apis mellifera) use for forage can help us to provide suitable plants for healthy honey bee colonies. Accordingly, honey DNA metabarcoding provides a valuable tool for investigating pollen and nectar collection. We investigated early season (April and May) floral choice by honey bees provided with a very high diversity of flowering plants within the National Botanic Garden of Wales. There was a close correspondence between the phenology of flowering and the detection of plants within the honey. Within the study area there were 437 genera of plants in flower during April and May, but only 11% of these were used. Thirty-nine plant taxa were recorded from three hives but only ten at greater than 1%. All three colonies used the same core set of native or near-native plants, typically found in hedgerows and woodlands. The major plants were supplemented with a range of horticultural species, with more variation in plant choice between the honey bee colonies. We conclude that during the spring, honey bees need access to native hedgerows and woodlands to provide major plants for foraging. Gardens provide supplementary flowers that may increase the nutritional diversity of the honey bee diet.
PLOS is a Public Library of Science, a non-profit publisher, innovator and advocacy organization.
It is known that honeybees use vibrational communication pathways to transfer information. One honeybee signal that has been previously investigated is the short vibrational pulse named the ‘stop signal’, because its inhibitory effect is generally the most accepted interpretation. The present study demonstrates long term (over 9 months) automated in-situ non-invasive monitoring of a honeybee vibrational pulse with the same characteristics of what has previously been described as a stop signal using ultra-sensitive accelerometers embedded in the honeycomb located at the heart of honeybee colonies. We show that the signal is very common and highly repeatable, occurring mainly at night with a distinct decrease in instances towards midday, and that it can be elicited en masse from bees following the gentle shaking or knocking of their hive with distinct evidence of habituation. The results of our study suggest that this vibrational pulse is generated under many different circumstances, thereby unifying previous publication’s conflicting definitions, and we demonstrate that this pulse can be generated in response to a surprise stimulus. This work suggests that, using an artificial stimulus and monitoring the changes in the features of this signal could provide a sensitive tool to assess colony status.
Identification of potential biomarker genes for selecting varroa tolerant honey bees (Apis mellifera) and biochemical characterization of a differentially expressed carboxylesterase genein response to mite infestation.
A Thesis Submitted to the College of Graduate Studies and Research in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Science in the Department of Food and Bioproduct Sciences University of Saskatchewan Saskatoon.
Varroa destructor, the introduced parasite of European honey bees associated with massive colony deaths, spreads readily through populations of honey bee colonies, both managed colonies living crowded together in apiaries and wild colonies living widely dispersed in natural settings. Mites are hypothesized to spread between most managed colonies via phoretically riding forager bees when they engage in robbing colonies or they drift between hives. However, widely spaced wild colonies show Varroa infestation despite limited opportunities for robbing and little or no drifting of bees between colonies. Both wild and managed colonies may also exchange mites via another mechanism that has received remarkably little attention or study: floral transmission. The present study tested the ability of mites to infest foragers at feeders or flowers. We show that Varroa destructor mites are highly capable of phoretically infesting foraging honey bees, detail the mechanisms and maneuvers by which they do so, and describe mite behaviors post-infestation.
Hornets (Vespa spp) are top insect predators that can control pests, but their venomous stings and defensive be-havior cause numerous human deaths throughout Asia. Hornets usually inhabit rural areas which reduces poten-tial conflict with humans. In 2003, the invasive hornet, Vespa velutina, arrived in southern Korea (Yeongdo region) and became established. It is currently spreading northwards at a rate of 10–20 km per year. Despite originating in tropical/subtropical areas of Indo-China, its nesting biology and life cycle in South Korea are similar to those found throughout its native range, with mature colonies containing 1000–1200 adults. In 7 years, V. velutina has become the most abundant hornet species in Southern Korea by displacing native Vespa species such as V. simillima, which has a similar nesting biology. We also found a significant positive correlation between the abundance of V. velutina and the degree of urbanization, indicating that this invasive species was well adapted to urban environments. This was supported by our finding that 41% of emergency call-outs (119 Rescue Services) to deal with social wasps/hornet problems were due to V. velutina, which was twice as high as the num-ber of calls about the next most abundant species. The rapid spread of V. velutina across southern Korea indicates that this species will continue to spread north-westward in the Korean peninsula and will become a major prob-lem as more people and beekeepers come into contact with this aggressive invasive hornet.
Emerging infectious diseases (EIDs) have contributed significantly to the current biodiversity crisis, leading to widespread epidemics and population loss. Owing to genetic variation in pathogen virulence, a complete understanding of species decline requires the accurate identification and characterization of EIDs. We explore this issue in the Western honeybee, where increasing mortality of populations in the Northern Hemisphere has caused major concern. Specifically, we investigate the importance of genetic identity of the main suspect in mortality, deformed wing virus (DWV), in driving honeybee loss. Using laboratory experiments and a systematic field survey, we demonstrate that an emerging DWV genotype (DWV-B) is more virulent than the established DWV genotype (DWV-A) and is widespread in the landscape. Furthermore, we show in a simple model that colonies infected with DWV-B collapse sooner than colonies infected with DWV-A. We also identify potential for rapid DWV evolution by revealing extensive genome-wide recombination in vivo. The emergence of DWV-B in naive honeybee populations, including via recombination with DWV-A, could be of significant ecological and economic importance. Our findings emphasize that knowledge of pathogen genetic identity and diversity is critical to understanding drivers of species decline.
This article is open access for the paper and us under the terms of the Creative Commons licence from the Proceedings of the Royal Society Biology Sciences.
Author manuscript; available in PMC 2014 August 20.
Published in final edited form as: Nature . 2014 February 20; 506(7488): 364–366. doi:10.1038/nature12977.
Author Contributions: The study was jointly conceived by R.J.P., J.O. and M.J.F.B.. Experiments were designed by M.A.F. and M.J.F.B.; M.A.F prepared the manuscript; M.J.F.B., D.P.M., R.J.P. and J.O. edited the manuscript. M.A.F. carried out the experimental work, molecular work and analyses apart from the phylogenetic analysis carried out by D.P.M..
Author Information: Viral RNA sequences have been deposited in GeneBank under accession numbers KF929216 – KF929290. The authors declare no competing financial interests. Readers are welcome to comment on the online version of the paper. Correspondence and requests for materials should be addressed to M.A.F (Matthias.Fuerst@rhul.ac.uk or Apocrite@gmail.com).
Emerging infectious diseases (EIDs) pose a risk to human welfare, both directly and indirectly, by affecting managed livestock and wildlife that provide valuable resources and ecosystem services, such as the pollination of crops. Honey bees (Apis mellifera), the prevailing managed insect crop pollinator, suffer from a range of emerging and exotic high impact pathogens, and population maintenance requires active management by beekeepers to control them. Wild pollinators such as bumble bees (Bombus spp.) are in global decline, one cause of which may be pathogen spillover from managed pollinators like honey bees, or commercial colonies of bumble bees. In our study, a combination of infection experiments with landscape scale field data indicates that honey bee EIDs are indeed widespread infectious agents within the pollinator assemblage. The prevalence of deformed wing virus (DWV) and the exotic Nosema ceranae is linked between honey bees and bumble bees, with honey bees having higher DWV prevalence, and sympatric bumble bees and honey bees sharing DWV strains; Apis is therefore the likely source of at least one major EID in wild pollinators. Lessons learned from vertebrates, highlight the need for increased pathogen control in managed bee species to maintain wild pollinators, as declines in native pollinators may be caused by interspecies pathogen transmission originating from managed pollinators.
This article is open access and pdf link for the paper used under the Creative Commons Attribution v4.0 International License.
How Honey Bee Colonies Survive in the Wild: Testing the Importance of Small Nests and Frequent Swarming.
The ectoparasitic mite,Varroa destructor, and the viruses that it transmits, kill the coloniesof European honey bees (Apis mellifera) kept by beekeepers unless the bees are treated with miticides. Nevertheless, there exist populations of wild colonies of European honey bees that are persisting without being treated with miticides. We hypothesized that the persistence of these wild colonies is due in part to their habits of nesting in small cavities and swarming frequently. We tested this hypothesis by establishing two groups of colonies living either in small hives (42 L) without swarm-control treatments or in large hives (up to 168 L) with swarm-control treatments. We followed the colonies for two years and compared the two groups with respect to swarming frequency, Varroa infesttion rate, disease incidence, and colony survival. Colonies in small hives swarmed more often, had lower Varroa infestation rates, had less disease, and had higher survival compared to colonies in large hives. These results indicate that the smaller nest cavities and more frequent swarming of wild colonies contribute to their persistence without mite treatments.

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