Climatic and latitudinal effects on beekeeping, meliponiculture and bee colony losses in Latin America

REQUIER, F; COLONY LOSSES WORKING GROUP; GARRIDO P. M.

Congreso; 46th APIMONDIA; 2019

International Federation of Beekeepers' Associations

Large-scalemonitoring programs applied to bees have allowed researchers to pinpoint theeffects of climate change on the current patterns of decline in wild andmanaged bee populations in the United States and across Europe. Consequently,detailed knowledge on the bee decline patterns was restricted to these latitudesand to the specific climatic and environmental contexts of the Northernhemisphere. We performed the first large-scale, volunteer-based survey, tomonitor honey bee and stingless bee (Tribu Meliponini) colony losses acrossLatin America. We aimed to describe the geographic patterns of bee mortalityand explore the climatic, health and management drivers underlying that spatialheterogeneity. More than a thousand producers (893 beekeepers and 115meliponicultors) participated of the survey of colony losses during 2016-2017.The spatial scale of the responses included the complete latitudinal gradientof Latin America, i.e. from Mexico to Argentina, encompassing a broad range ofclimates and altitudes. While meliponiculture activities (the keeping of coloniesof stingless bee species) were biogeographically restricted to sub-tropical andtropical regions with high rainfall and high temperature, beekeeping (the managementof Western honey bee Apis mellifera colonies) was widely distributed over the climatic range. Interestingly,honey bee and stingless bee colony mortalities were not homogeneouslydistributed across the region. Here, we will discuss our results in relation tovarious potential drivers of colony loss that could explain the patterns weuncovered. We will specifically test the respective effect of environmental variables(climate, altitude, landscape), operation size, disease incidence (twowell-established drivers of bee colony mortality in the Northern Hemisphere),and their interactions. We will beinterested in exploring how the already identified drivers of colony loss (e.g.operation size, disease incidence) are representative in this region or eithernew drivers emerge due to unique characteristics of the data context (e.g.climate, altitude, landscape). These results will help our understanding of theprocesses involved in bee colony mortality, as well as provide tools for riskassessment for apiculture and meliponiculture.