Bee Researchers Research Articles

Words matter: how ecologists discuss managed and non-managed bees and birds

Effectively promoting the stability and quality of ecosystem services involves the successful management of domesticated species and the control of introduced species. In the pollinator literature, interest and concern regarding pollinator species and pollinator health dramatically increased in recent years. Concurrently, the use of loaded terms when discussing domesticated and non-native species may have increased. As a result, pollinator ecology has inherited both the confusion associated with invasion biology’s lack of a standardized terminology to describe native, managed, or introduced species as well as loaded terms with very strong positive or negative connotations. The recent explosion of research on native bees and alternative pollinators, coupled with the use of loaded language, has led to a perceived divide between native bee and managed bee researchers. In comparison, the bird literature discusses the study of managed (poultry) and non-managed (all other birds) species without an apparent conflict with regard to the use of terms with strong connotations or sentiment. Here, we analyze word usage when discussing non-managed and managed bee and bird species in 3614 ecological and evolutionary biology papers published between 1990 and 2019. Using time series analyses, we demonstrate how the use of specific descriptor terms (such as wild, introduced, and exotic) changed over time. We then conducted co-citation network analyses to determine whether papers that share references have similar terminology and sentiment. We predicted a negative language bias towards introduced species and positive language bias towards native species. We found an association between the term invasive and bumble bees and we observed significant increases in the usage of more ambiguous terms to describe non-managed species, such as wild. We detected a negative sentiment associated with the research area of pathogen spillover in bumble bees, which corroborates the subjectivity that language carries. We recommend using terms that acknowledge the role of human activities on pathogen spillover and biological invasions. Avoiding the usage of loaded terms when discussing managed and non-managed species will advance our understanding and promote effective and productive communication across scientists, general public, policy makers and other stake holders in our society.

Honey bee functional genomics using symbiont-mediated RNAi.

Honey bees are indispensable pollinators and model organisms for studying social behavior, development and cognition. However, their eusociality makes it difficult to use standard forward genetic approaches to study gene function. Most functional genomics studies in bees currently utilize double-stranded RNA (dsRNA) injection or feeding to induce RNAi-mediated knockdown of a gene of interest. However, dsRNA injection is laborious and harmful, and dsRNA feeding is difficult to scale cheaply. Further, both methods require repeated dsRNA administration to ensure a continued RNAi response. To fill this gap, we engineered the bee gut bacterium Snodgrassella alvi to induce a sustained host RNA interference response that reduces expression of a targeted gene. To employ this functional genomics using engineered symbionts (FUGUES) procedure, a dsRNA expression plasmid is cloned in Escherichia coli using Golden Gate assembly and then transferred to S. alvi. Adult worker bees are then colonized with engineered S. alvi. Finally, gene knockdown is verified through qRT-PCR, and bee phenotypes of interest can be further assessed. Expression of targeted genes is reduced by as much as 50-75% throughout the entire bee body by 5 d after colonization. This protocol can be accomplished in 4 weeks by bee researchers with microbiology and molecular cloning skills. FUGUES currently offers a streamlined and scalable approach for studying the biology of honey bees. Engineering other microbial symbionts to influence their hosts in ways that are similar to those described in this protocol may prove useful for studying additional insect and animal species in the future.

Honey Bees and Industrial Agriculture: What Researchers are Missing, and Why it's a Problem.

Industrial agriculture is the root cause of many health problems that honey bees (Apis mellifera Linneaus, 1758) face, but honey bee researchers seldom call attention to this fact. We often discuss the stressors that contribute to colony loss (e.g., pathogens, pesticides, poor nutrition), but we rarely talk about where those stressors come from. This is a problem because we cannot resolve honey bee health issues unless we confront the systems that cause them harm. In this forum article, I unpack the relationship between honey bee health and industrial agriculture. I propose steps we can take to reframe our research to account for the impacts of this destructive system, and I discuss the uncomfortable questions that surface when we engage in this process. The goal of this article is to encourage conversation within the honey bee research community around the impacts of industrial agriculture, so that we can fully engage in the transformative change needed to support honey bee health.

Monitoring of Honey Bee Colony Losses: A Special Issue

In recent decades, independent national and international research programs have revealed possible reasons for the death of managed honey bee colonies worldwide. Such losses are not due to a single factor, but instead are due to highly complex interactions between various internal and external influences, including pests, pathogens, honey bee stock diversity, and environmental change. Reduced honey bee vitality and nutrition, exposure to agrochemicals, and quality of colony management contribute to reduced colony survival in beekeeping operations. Our Special Issue (SI) on ‘’Monitoring of Honey Bee Colony Losses’’ aims to address specific challenges facing honey bee researchers and beekeepers. This SI includes four reviews, with one being a meta-analysis that identifies gaps in the current and future directions for research into honey bee colonies mortalities. Other review articles include studies regarding the impact of numerous factors on honey bee mortality, including external abiotic factors (e.g., winter conditions and colony management) as well as biotic factors such as attacks by Vespa velutina and Varroa destructor.

Ignorance loops: How non-knowledge about bee-toxic agrochemicals is iteratively produced.

In this article, I examine the knowledge politics around pesticides in the United States and the role it plays in honey bee declines. Since 2006, US beekeepers have lost an average of one-third of their colonies each year. Though a number of factors influence bee health, beekeepers, researchers and policymakers cite pesticides as a primary contributor. In the US, pesticide registration is overseen by the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), with the required tests conducted by chemical companies applying for registration. Until 2016, the EPA only required chemical companies to measure acute toxicity for non-target species, which means that many pesticides with sublethal toxicities are not labeled bee-toxic, and farmers can apply them without penalty while bees are on their farms or orchards. In addition, California state and county regulators will typically only investigate a bee kill caused by a labeled bee-toxic pesticide, and so emergent data on non-labeled, sublethal pesticides goes uncollected. These gaps in data collection frustrate beekeepers and disincentivize them from reporting colony losses to regulatory agencies - thus reinforcing ignorance about which chemicals are toxic to bees. I term the iterative cycle of non-knowledge co-constituted by regulatory shortfalls and stakeholder regulatory disengagement an 'ignorance loop'. I conclude with a discussion of what this dynamic can tell us about the politics of knowledge production and pesticide governance and the consequences of 'ignorance loops' for stakeholders and the environment.

Workshop on Pesticide Exposure Assessment Paradigm for Non-Apis Bees: Foundation and Summaries.

Current pesticide risk assessment practices use the honey bee, Apis mellifera L., as a surrogate to characterize the likelihood of chemical exposure of a candidate pesticide for all bee species. Bees make up a diverse insect group that provides critical pollination services to both managed and wild ecosystems. Accordingly, they display a diversity of behaviors and vary greatly in their lifestyles and phenologies, such as their timing of emergence, degree of sociality, and foraging and nesting behaviors. Some of these factors may lead to disparate or variable routes of exposure when compared to honey bees. For those that possess life histories that are distinct from A. mellifera, further risk assessments may be warranted. In January 2017, 40 bee researchers, representative of regulatory agencies, academia, and agrochemical industries, gathered to discuss the current state of science on pesticide exposure to non-Apis bees and to determine how well honey bee exposure estimates, implemented by different regulatory agencies, may be protective for non-Apis bees. Workshop participants determined that although current risk assessment procedures for honey bees are largely conservative, several routes of exposure are unique to non-Apis bees and warranted further investigation. In this forum article, we discuss these key routes of exposure relevant to non-Apis bees and identify important research gaps that can help inform future bee risk assessment decisions.

What We Can (or Cannot) Learn from Multifloral Pollen Pellets

Pollen and its diversity, including the color of pollen pellets, have caught the attraction of bee keepers and researchers. Pollen is known to play an important role in the nutrition of honey bees ...

Can poisons stimulate bees? Appreciating the potential of hormesis in bee-pesticide research.

Hormesis, a biphasic dose response whereby exposure to low doses of a stressor can stimulate biological processes, has been reported in many organisms, including pest insects when they are exposed to low doses of a pesticide. However, awareness of the hormesis phenomenon seems to be limited among bee researchers, in spite of the increased emphasis of late on pollinator toxicology and risk assessment. In this commentary, we show that there are several examples in the literature of substances that are toxic to bees at high doses but stimulatory at low doses. Appreciation of the hormetic dose response by bee researchers will improve our fundamental understanding of how bees respond to low doses of chemical stressors, and may be useful in pollinator risk assessment.

Entomology: The bee-all and end-all.

Seven scientists give their opinions on the biggest challenges faced by bees and bee researchers.

Addendum to: Joseph Vachal (1838-1911): French entomologist and politician (Zootaxa, 3442, 1-52).

A series of recent papers has compiled brief biographies and listed the scientific publications and taxa proposed for a number of bee researchers (Rasmussen et al. 2007; Zuparko 2007; Rasmussen & Ascher 2008; Rasmussen et al. 2009; Rasmussen 2012; Rasmussen et al. 2013). Unfortunately five taxa attributed in the original publication to Vachal were overlooked in the recent review of his taxonomic work (Rasmussen 2012). Whereas these five names for halictine bees appeared with brief Latin descriptions in the publication by Kohl (1905), all other hymenopteran taxa described by Kohl in this paper had descriptions in German. At least one of the halictine names has been attributed to Kohl (Warncke, 1984), but based on the fact that 1) Kohl gave Vachal the authorship (as “J. Vachal n. sp.”) and 2) the five descriptions are in a different language from the taxa described by Kohl in the same paper, these five names should all be referred to Vachal as pointed out by Ebmer (1976). The paper by Kohl (1905) lists all of the Hymenoptera collected from the surroundings of the snow-capped stratovolcano Mount Erciyes (Erciyes Dag, as Erdschias) of Kayseri Province in Turkey, the highest mountain of central Anatolia. Bee localities visited by the expedition include Bos Tepe and Ewlije-Dagh south of Kayseri and Yilanli Dag (as Illany-Dagh) west of Kayseri. “Bussara (vel Bussana)” is not listed in the gazetteer introducing the study or in Penther (1906), but is possible Bursa in northwest Turkey (Ebmer 2000). Thus, Rasmussen (2012) should be amended to reflect that Vachal described 791 new species (not 786). In addition Table 2 listing the collectors of specimens described by Vachal as new taxa should be amended to include: Penther, Arnold (1865–1931): Turkey (Erciyes and vicinity, “Bussara (vel Bussana)?” (probably Bursa)).

Nesting Biology of the Leafcutting BeeMegachile minutissima(Hymenoptera: Megachilidae) in Central Saudi Arabia

AbstractThe leafcutting bee Megachile (Eutricharaea) minutissima Radoszkowski is a widely distributed species in the Middle East and a promising pollinator of alfalfa. We provide information on the nest architecture, foraging behavior, phenology, and host plants of a wild population of M. minutissima studied between March 2010 and September 2012 in Amariah, a typical desert in central Saudi Arabia. Bees nested in preexisting cavities in the sandy, dry, and loose soil, and built between 2 and 14 leaf-lined brood cells per nest. Females built and provisioned 1–2 cells per day, each consisting of a large oval piece from which the cell cup was made and a small semiround piece that was used as cell cap; however, occasionally small oval pieces were also used in the latter. Cells were built from leaves of Ricinus communis L. (Euphorbiaceae), a locally abundant plant. Both sexes were captured from March to October at flowers of 11 species (10 families), indicating some degree of polylecty as well as either bivoltinism or multivoltinism. We also provide comparative taxonomie comments that will assist bee researchers to easily recognize this species.

A Honey Bee (Apis mellifera) Light Phase Response Curve

The authors report a phase response curve (PRC) for individual honey bees (Apis mellifera) to single 1-h light pulses (1000 lux) using an Aschoff Type 1 protocol (n = 134). The bee PRC is a weak (Type 1) PRC with a maximum advance of 1.5 h between circadian time (CT) 18 and 3 and a maximum delay of 1.5 h between CT 12 and 18. This is the first published honey bee light PRC and provides an important resource for chronobiologists and honey bee researchers. It may also have practical applications for what is an economically important species frequently transported across different time zones. (Author correspondence: G.warman@auckland.ac.nz)

New fears over bee declines

Summary Around the world, losses of bee colonies and wild pollinators continue. Emerging explanations are complex and call for more research, but the case against systemic pesticides is gaining strength. Michael Gross investigates.

New information resources for bee research

Rapid developments in the field of information technology are changing the ways in which research publications are stored, searched and delivered. Many new services are appearing and these are improving access to research information, but it can be hard to keep up with what is now available. This article describes a selection of resources, some of them free, that are likely to be useful for bee researchers or for beekeepers interested in finding out about the latest research. They include services for searching abstracts on the internet or on CD and obtaining the full text of articles online. The procedures for using the Ingenta service to obtain articles online from IBRA journals (Bee World and Journal of Apicultural Research) are described in detail.

A General Model of Pheromone Transmission Within Honey Bee Hives

Many activities in a honey bee hive are thought to be regulated by non-volatile pheromones produced by the queen. These pheromones are transmitted among the workers both by direct contact and by deposition on the retrieval from the wax substrate of the hive. This paper presents a general model for the movement of these pheromones through a honey bee colony.The specific pheromone used for the model is produced by honey bee queens, and is thought to play a determining role in colony swarming. Thus, the results presented here are of interest to both beekeepers, for whom swarming represents the loss of a valuable resource, and bee researchers, who are interested in swarming as an example of social coordination.The model consists of a system of stochastic differential equations describing the evolution of the pheromone level and position of each bee in the hive. The equations are studied using a numerical simulation. The results of the simulations show that hive crowding can have a significant effect on pheromone transmission, and that this effect is not simply a dilution of similar quantities of pheromone among more workers. Thus, restricting worker movement induced by crowding may have a strong effect on pheromone transmission and, therefore, advance queen rearing and swarming.

The incidence and world distribution of honey bee viruses

Honey bee viruses are increasingly of interest to both bee researchers and beekeepers, primarily because of their association with the parasitic mite Varroa jacobsoni. The identification of viruses requires specialized techniques, and reviews of honey bee disease distribution that have been published so far do not contain much information on viruses. The authors, leading experts on bee viruses, have collected together data from many sources to produce this important review.

Early Bee Researchers in the US Department of Agriculture

Early Bee Researchers in the US Department of Agriculture