Abstract
Surveys of managed honey bee colony losses worldwide have become fundamental for engineering a sustainable and systematic approach to protect honey bees. Though China is a member of the world’s apiculture superpowers, the investigation of honey bee colony losses from Chinese government was not formally launched until recently. In this study, we investigated the colony winter losses of the western honey bee (Apis mellifera) of four consecutive years in 2013–2017 from 19 provinces in China, with a total of 2387 responding Chinese beekeepers (195 hobby beekeepers, 1789 side-line beekeepers, 403 commercial beekeepers) providing the records of overwintering mortality of honey bee colonies. The calculated colony losses were 8.7%, a relatively low mortality below the world average. There still exist considerable variations in total losses among provinces (ranging from 0.9% to 22.0%), years (ranging from 8.1% to 10.6%) and scales of apiaries (ranging from 7.5% to 10.0%). Furthermore, we deeply analyzed and estimated the effects of potential risk factors on the colonies’ winter losses, and speculated that the queen problems, the operation sizes and proportion of new queens are leading causes of the high honey bee colony mortality in China. More research and advanced technical methods are still required for correlation analysis and verification in future surveys of managed honey bee colony winter losses.
Highlights
Honey bees, important pollinators, have been demonstrated to be capable of increasing yield in 96% of animal-pollinated crops, creating a value of 212 billion dollars annually [1,2]
By generalized linear mixed models (GLMMs) analysis, we found that queen problems, apiary size and proportion of new queens have significant influences on colony winter losses
Our survey has recorded the colony winter losses of 19 provinces in China and has showed that loss rates vary among different years, provinces and the apiary sizes
Summary
Important pollinators, have been demonstrated to be capable of increasing yield in 96% of animal-pollinated crops, creating a value of 212 billion dollars annually [1,2]. States for several years [9,10,11,12,13,14], as well as in Europe [5,6,15,16,17,18], Asia [19,20], and Africa [21] It has been revealed in the United States, Europe, and other regions that honey bee colonies have a high mortality rate. The mortality of honey bee colonies is caused by multiple factors and these potential risk factors are interacting, so the measures to lower colony decline should be as diversified as the causes [4,5,13,14]. These survey results show that potential risk factors driving honey bee colony decline could involve queen problems, diseases and parasites, the environment, beekeeping practices, Diversity 2020, 12, 318; doi:10.3390/d12090318 www.mdpi.com/journal/diversity
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