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ARS Home » Northeast Area » Beltsville, Maryland (BARC) » Beltsville Agricultural Research Center » Bee Research Laboratory » Research » Publications at this Location » Publication #414830
Research Project: Managing Honey Bees Against Disease and Colony Stress

Location: Bee Research Laboratory

Title: Found in Translation: Colony turnover, the big picture

Author
item Evans, Jay

Submitted to: Bee Culture
Publication Type: Trade Journal
Publication Acceptance Date: 6/1/2024
Publication Date: 6/1/2024
Citation: Evans, J.D. 2024. Found in Translation: Colony turnover, the big picture. Bee Culture. 6:12-13.

Interpretive Summary: .

Technical Abstract: Last month I focused from inside the box on the beauty and productivity of honey bee colonies, and the parts that must work together to keep things buzzing. Now it is time to look down (sometimes literally, in the form of satellites) at U.S. bee colonies and see what we can glean from a distance. A recent paper by Kirti Rajagopalan and colleagues from Washington State University and USDA (including longtime honey bee health researcher Gloria deGrandi-Hoffman) has pulled together a classic colony growth and prosperity model for honey bees (VARROAPOP) with current and future climate trends to give a truly unique view of how and why the elements can interact with disease and nutrition to impact bee health (doi:10.1038/s41598-024-55327-8). One of the takeaways, perhaps familiar to those keeping bees in much of the US, is that mild weather is not always a great thing for bees. By showing the impacts of longer, warmer, fall seasons the authors demonstrate that bees prepping for winter do better when the switch comes quickly than when those bees are induced to spend another month out looking for declining forage.