A biophysical approach to assess weather impacts on honey bee colony winter mortality
The western honey bee (Apis mellifera) is one of the most important insects kept by humans, but high colony losses are reported around the world. While the effects of general climatic conditions on colony winter mortality were already demonstrated, no study has investigated specific weather conditio...
Autores principales: | , , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
The Royal Society
2021
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8483266/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/34631120 http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rsos.210618 |
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author | Becsi, Benedikt Formayer, Herbert Brodschneider, Robert |
author_facet | Becsi, Benedikt Formayer, Herbert Brodschneider, Robert |
author_sort | Becsi, Benedikt |
collection | PubMed |
description | The western honey bee (Apis mellifera) is one of the most important insects kept by humans, but high colony losses are reported around the world. While the effects of general climatic conditions on colony winter mortality were already demonstrated, no study has investigated specific weather conditions linked to biophysical processes governing colony vitality. Here, we quantify the comparative relevance of four such processes that co-determine the colonies' fitness for wintering during the annual hive management cycle, using a 10-year dataset of winter colony mortality in Austria that includes 266 378 bee colonies. We formulate four process-based hypotheses for wintering success and operationalize them with weather indicators. The empirical data is used to fit simple and multiple linear regression models on different geographical scales. The results show that approximately 20% of winter mortality variability can be explained by the analysed weather conditions, and that it is most sensitive to the duration of extreme cold spells in mid and late winter. Our approach shows the potential of developing weather indicators based on biophysical processes and discusses the way forward for applying them in climate change studies. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-8483266 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2021 |
publisher | The Royal Society |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-84832662021-10-08 A biophysical approach to assess weather impacts on honey bee colony winter mortality Becsi, Benedikt Formayer, Herbert Brodschneider, Robert R Soc Open Sci Ecology, Conservation and Global Change Biology The western honey bee (Apis mellifera) is one of the most important insects kept by humans, but high colony losses are reported around the world. While the effects of general climatic conditions on colony winter mortality were already demonstrated, no study has investigated specific weather conditions linked to biophysical processes governing colony vitality. Here, we quantify the comparative relevance of four such processes that co-determine the colonies' fitness for wintering during the annual hive management cycle, using a 10-year dataset of winter colony mortality in Austria that includes 266 378 bee colonies. We formulate four process-based hypotheses for wintering success and operationalize them with weather indicators. The empirical data is used to fit simple and multiple linear regression models on different geographical scales. The results show that approximately 20% of winter mortality variability can be explained by the analysed weather conditions, and that it is most sensitive to the duration of extreme cold spells in mid and late winter. Our approach shows the potential of developing weather indicators based on biophysical processes and discusses the way forward for applying them in climate change studies. The Royal Society 2021-09-22 /pmc/articles/PMC8483266/ /pubmed/34631120 http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rsos.210618 Text en © 2021 The Authors. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Published by the Royal Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) , which permits unrestricted use, provided the original author and source are credited. |
spellingShingle | Ecology, Conservation and Global Change Biology Becsi, Benedikt Formayer, Herbert Brodschneider, Robert A biophysical approach to assess weather impacts on honey bee colony winter mortality |
title | A biophysical approach to assess weather impacts on honey bee colony winter mortality |
title_full | A biophysical approach to assess weather impacts on honey bee colony winter mortality |
title_fullStr | A biophysical approach to assess weather impacts on honey bee colony winter mortality |
title_full_unstemmed | A biophysical approach to assess weather impacts on honey bee colony winter mortality |
title_short | A biophysical approach to assess weather impacts on honey bee colony winter mortality |
title_sort | biophysical approach to assess weather impacts on honey bee colony winter mortality |
topic | Ecology, Conservation and Global Change Biology |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8483266/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/34631120 http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rsos.210618 |
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