It’s not a single pesticide or virus stressing honey bees, and affecting their health, but exposure to a complex web of multiple interacting stressors encountered while at work pollinating crops, new research from York University has found.
It’s not a single pesticide or virus stressing honey bees, and affecting their health, but exposure to a complex web of multiple interacting stressors encountered while at work pollinating crops, new research from York University has found.
Scientists have been unable to explain increasing colony mortality, even after decades of research examining the role of specific pesticides, parasitic mites, viruses or genetics. This led the research team to wonder if previous studies were missing something by focusing on one stressor at a time.
“Our study is the first to apply systems-level or network analyses to honey bee stressors at a massive scale. I think this represents a paradigm shift in the field because we have been so focused on finding the one big thing, the smoking gun,” says the corresponding author of the new paper York Faculty of Science Professor Amro Zayed, York Research Chair in Genomics. “But we are finding that bees are exposed to a very complicated network of stressors that change quickly over time and space. It’s a level of complexity that we haven’t thought about before. To me, that’s the big surprise of this study.”
The paper, titled “Honey bee stressor networks are complex and dependent on crop and region,” published in Current Biology, takes a much broader look at the interplay of stressors and their effects. The study team also included researchers from the University of British Columbia, Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada, the University of Victoria, the University of Lethbridge, the University of Manitoba, l’Université Laval, the University of Guelph, and the Ontario Beekeepers’ Association.
