Children's Health Defense Honey bee declines in the U.S. are “primarily related” to pesticide exposure, parasitic mites and extreme weather conditions, research published by Penn State scientists have determined.
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Honey bee declines in the U.S. are “primarily related” to pesticide exposure, parasitic mites and extreme weather conditions, research published by Penn State scientists have determined.
Publishing the results in Scientific Reports, the researchers aim to provide a national overview of the range of factors harming bee colonies.
“Some previous studies have explored several potential stressors related to colony loss in a detailed way but are limited to narrow, regional areas,” said study co-author Luca Insolia, Ph.D.
Insolia said:
“The one study that we know of at the national level in the United States explored only a single potential stressor. For this study, we integrated many large datasets at different spatial and temporal resolutions and used new, sophisticated statistical methods to assess several potential stressors associated with colony collapse across the U.S.”
The results reinforce calls from bee health advocates in the U.S. and around the world: eliminate toxic pesticide use, the lowest-hanging fruit contributing to pollinator declines.
In order to create a more comprehensive national overview, geographers, entomologists and statisticians all participated in the study, reviewing publicly available data on colony health, land use, weather and other environmental factors over a five-year period from 2015-2021.
“In order to analyze the data all together, we had to come up with a technique to match the resolution of the various data sources,” said Martina Calovi, Ph.D., corresponding author of the study and researcher at Penn State.
Calovi continued:
“We could have just taken an average of all the weather measurements we had within a state, but that boils all the information we have into one number and loses a lot of information, especially about any extreme values. In addition to averaging weather data, we used an ‘upscaling’ technique to summarize the data in several different ways, which allowed us to retain more information, including about the frequency of extreme temperature and precipitation events.”
Results show spatio-temporal trends that are perhaps unsurprising to many beekeepers but could help inform better beekeeping practices…
READ FULL ARTICLE HERE… (childrenshealthdefense.org)
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