73 research outputs found
Recommended from our members
Citizen science monitoring reveals links between honeybee health, pesticide exposure and seasonal availability of floral resources
We use a national citizen science monitoring scheme to quantify how agricultural intensifcation
afects honeybee diet breadth (number of plant species). To do this we used DNA metabarcoding
to identify the plants present in 527 honey samples collected in 2019 across Great Britain. The
species richness of forage plants was negatively correlated with arable cropping area, although this
was only found early in the year when the abundance of fowering plants was more limited. Within
intensively farmed areas, honeybee diets were dominated by Brassica crops (including oilseed rape).
We demonstrate how the structure and complexity of honeybee foraging relationships with plants is
negatively afected by the area of arable crops surrounding hives. Using information collected from
the beekeepers on the incidence of an economically damaging bee disease (Deformed Wing Virus)
we found that the occurrence of this disease increased where bees foraged in agricultural land where
there was a high use of foliar insecticides. Understanding impacts of land use on resource availability
is fundamental to assessing long-term viability of pollinator populations. These fndings highlight
the importance of supporting temporally timed resources as mitigation strategies to support wider
pollinator population viability
- …