Abstract
Foraging honey bees (Apis mellifera L.) can routinely travel as far as several kilometers from their hive in the process of collecting nectar and pollen from floral patches within the surrounding landscape. Since the availability of floral resources at the landscape scale is a function of landscape composition, apiculturists have long recognized that landscape composition is a critical determinant of honey bee colony success. Nevertheless, very few studies present quantitative data relating colony success metrics to local landscape composition. We employed a beekeeper survey in conjunction with GIS-based landscape analysis to model colony success as a function of landscape composition in the State of Ohio, USA, a region characterized by intensive cropland, urban development, deciduous forest, and grassland. We found that colony food accumulation and wax production were positively related to cropland and negatively related to forest and grassland, a pattern that may be driven by the abundance of dandelion and clovers in agricultural areas compared to forest or mature grassland. Colony food accumulation was also negatively correlated with urban land cover in sites dominated by urban and agricultural land use, which does not support the popular opinion that the urban environment is more favorable to honey bees than cropland.
Highlights
Honey bees (Apis mellifera, L.) exist in large, eusocial colonies that require massive and sustained inputs of floral nectar and pollen
Using a citizen-science survey, we investigate the relationship between colony success and the landscape as a whole, accounting for all major land cover types and for the potential influence of hive management variables that vary between beekeepers
Modeling colony success metrics by urban landcover In the subset of sites for which Urban + Crop was greater than 50% of total land cover, we found a significant (p < 0.05) negative relationship between Food and Urban (Fig. 5) at all spatial scales except for the two extremes of 0.5 km and 5 km; the relationship was strongest at the 2 km scale (F = 6.041, df = 29, p = 0.02)
Summary
Honey bees (Apis mellifera, L.) exist in large, eusocial colonies that require massive and sustained inputs of floral nectar and pollen. They meet this demand by foraging at an extremely large spatial scale and with rapid responsiveness to changes in the surrounding floral community (Visscher & Seeley, 1982; Seeley, 1995). Because honey bee foraging is a decidedly landscape-scale process, one should expect landscape composition to interact meaningfully with colony nutrition and overall colony success. As rapid landscape conversion continues as a global phenomenon, and beekeepers in many regions continue to suffer unsustainable losses, the task of refining and expanding our knowledge of honey bee landscape ecology takes on obvious urgency
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