Industrial bees: The impact of apicultural intensification on local disease prevalence

Abstract

It is generally thought that the intensification of farming will result in higher disease prevalences, although there is little specific modelling testing this idea. Focussing on honeybees, we build multi‐colony models to inform how “apicultural intensification” is predicted to impact honeybee pathogen epidemiology at the apiary scale.We used both agent‐based and analytical models to show that three linked aspects of apicultural intensification (increased population sizes, changes in population network structure and increased between‐colony transmission) are unlikely to greatly increase disease prevalence in apiaries. Principally this is because even low‐intensity apiculture exhibits high disease prevalence.The greatest impacts of apicultural intensification are found for diseases with relatively low R0 (basic reproduction number), however, such diseases cause little overall disease prevalence and, therefore, the impacts of intensification are minor. Furthermore, the smallest impacts of intensification are for diseases with high R0 values, which we argue are typical of important honeybee diseases. Policy Implications: Our findings contradict the idea that apicultural intensification by crowding honeybee colonies in large, dense apiaries leads to notably higher disease prevalences for established honeybee pathogens. More broadly, our work demonstrates the need for informative models of all agricultural systems and management practices in order to understand the implications of management changes on diseases.

Honey robbing: could human changes to the environment transform a rare foraging tactic into a maladaptive behavior?

“…If so, the use of migratory colonies for pollination could exacerbate robbing when colonies are set out closely spaced and bees begin to orient themselves in a new location. Other costs like pathogen and parasite transmission may be higher in high density conditions, and the impact of robbing in these contexts remains to be considered [51,52]. For beekeepers, the costs associated with robbing-related mortality and disease risk are compensated, to a degree, by the financial gains from pollination services.…”

Advances and perspectives in selecting resistance traits against the parasitic mite Varroa destructor in honey bees

“…Supporting the idea of a non-genetic survival mechanism, colonies from this feral population transferred to a conventional apiary, in which colonies are kept in close proximity, did not show reduced infestation levels when compared with colonies from susceptible stock [ 224 ]. Modelling the effect of colony density and inter-colonial distances on V. destructor dispersal [ 225 ] differed from the observations in the field [ 151 , 223 ], highlighting the insufficient understanding of V. destructor dispersal.…”

A model of infection in honeybee colonies with social immunity

“…Modeling inter-colony pathogen transmission has also been presented. Bartlett et al [ 44 ] examined how management practices (e.g., colony numbers and colony arrangement configurations) at the apiary scale could impact pathogen prevalence.…”

“…Additionally, previous models were deterministic-based (except [ 24 ] and [ 44 ]), neglecting the stochastic nature of infection transmission. Our study emphasizes the role of stochasticity that contributes to colony status.…”