A pan-European epidemiological study reveals honey bee colony survival depends on beekeeper education and disease control.

Antoine Jacques,Marion Laurent,Marie-Pierre Chauzat,Giles E Budge,Pascal Hendrikx,Magali Ribière-Chabert,Mathilde Saussac,Stéphanie Bougeard,Nicolas Chaline

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0172591

Abstract

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.

Highlights

Honey bees are highly effective pollinators with an annual global contribution to crop productivity of € 147 million [1]
The selection of Member States taking part to EPILOBEE, the methodology to randomly pick up the apiaries and the beekeepers, the evaluation of the protocols set up in each Member State are described in details in Chauzat et al [20] and in the guidelines published by the European Reference Laboratory for Honey bee Health (EURL) [21, 22]
The main honey bee diseases clinically investigated were those listed for notification for intra-EU trade and import rules or for national eradication programmes at the European level [23, 24]: the fungal disease Nosemosis; the parasitic disease varroosis; the two main bacterial diseases affecting honey bee brood; the American foulbrood (AFB) and the European foulbrood (EFB); and a viral disease caused by the chronic bee paralysis virus (CBPV)

Summary

Introduction

Honey bees are highly effective pollinators with an annual global contribution to crop productivity of € 147 million [1]. Recent decades have seen heightened concern about honey bee colony mortaility across the United States [2, 3], Asia [4] and Europe [5]. Whilst the global number of managed colonies has risen by about 45% over the last 60 years [6, 7], the seemingly unpredicable loss of honey bee colonies exacerbates the shortage of pollinators leading to concerns that. Honey bee colony survival in Europe was co-funded by EFSA together with the EURL for honey bee health. The specific role of these authors rare articulated in author contribution section

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Discussion

Conclusion