Location: Invasive Species and Pollinator Health
2019 Annual Report
Objectives
Pollinators, such as honey bees and other insects, are critical components of both natural ecosystems and agroecosystems, ensuring the production of many agronomic crops.
Objective 1: Employing long-term, longitudinal studies of honey bee survivorship under current management conditions for honey bees used as pollinators and honey producers, elucidate honey bee forage needs and causes of mortality to serve as the basis for best management practices for pollination of specialty crops such as almond. [NP305, Component 2, Problem Statements 2A, 2B, 2C]
Approach
Honey bees are the main pollinators of crops in the United States and worldwide.Losses of honey bees due to a variety of factors are unsustainable at the current levels of over 30 percent. To mitigate these losses, it is necessary to determine their causal factors; however, long-term baseline data for colony survivorship is not available that can be used to parse the relative importance of suspected factors. It is therefore crucial to develop such a methodology, particularly as part of long-term longitudinal studies of spatial and temporal changes in bee populations exposed to a number of abiotic and biotic stresses and management practices. These longitudinal studies may incorporate research on pesticide, pathogen/pest, and nutrition/forage or other bee health effects, using hives that are stationary as well as those that follow pollination service migratory routes. The proposed longitudinal studies support ARS National Program on Production (NP305) Action Plan research objectives; Component 2: Bee Health; Problem Statements 2A: Bee Management—Improving Bee Nutrition and Performance, 2B: Bee Health—Mitigating the Impacts of Pathogens, Pests, and Pesticides, and 2C: Maximizing Bee Pollination and Quantifying Bee Forage Requirements of the Action Plan.
Progress Report
Widespread pesticide use poses a major threat to wild and managed bees. The risk of these pesticides to bees is still largely unknown, particularly beyond field scale trials and single exposure events. To better understand large-scale patterns of pesticide risk, ARS scientists are collaborating with University of California, Davis, scientists to develop predictive maps and validate these predictions with empirical pesticide loads sampled from sentinel hives. University collaborators have unified the 2017 California Pesticide Use Report and state-wide parcel data for Yolo, Sutter, and Colusa counties. For 37 pesticides, the amount, timing, and parcel specific application location have been quantified. Scientists have collated separate data on decay rate and toxicity to bees of these chemicals. This fine-scale spatiotemporal data has been combined with an existing predictive bee foraging model available from the scientific literature. Next steps include testing sensitivity of predictions to specific foraging model settings and identifying specific pesticide concerns. In the coming season, scientists will begin evaluation of the preliminary model, testing correspondence of predicted pesticide risk with field measured pesticide loads observed in sentinel hives. This effort will generate, for the first time, landscape-scale risk maps for an important and pollinator-dependent agricultural region.
Additional activities during the year focused on the recruitment of two scientists to work on the project as well as acquiring additional space for the new employees. Recruitment for the two scientists was initiated during the previous year, but selection was not completed prior to the federal hiring freeze. Hiring prioritization by administrators and a recent human resources sprint has resulted in the re-advertisement of the two scientist positions. Interviews were conducted and selections have been made. One scientist joined the program in June and the second is expected to start in September. Mobile office and laboratory facilities adjacent to the University’s Harry H. Laidlaw Jr. Honey Bee Research Facility are now fully functional and equipment is being installed. Efforts are underway to add an additional mobile facility to the site, to provide additional office and research space for the growing program. Two cubical office spaces are being prepared by the University of California, Davis, Entomology and Nematology Department to provide space for the new scientists.
Accomplishments
