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

REQUIER F.; ANTÚNEZ K.; REYNALDI FJ; COLONY LOSSES GROUP

Montreal

Congreso; 46th International Apicultural Congress; 2019

APIMONDIA

Large-scale monitoring programs applied to bees have allowed researchers to pinpoint the effects of climate change on the currentpatterns of decline in wild and managed bee populations in the United States and across Europe. Consequently, detailed knowledge on thebee decline patterns was restricted to these latitudes and to the specific climatic and environmental contexts of the Northern hemisphere.We performed the first large-scale, volunteer-based survey, to monitor honey bee and stingless bee (Tribu Meliponini) colony losses acrossLatin America. We aimed to describe the geographic patterns of bee mortality and explore the climatic, health and management driversunderlying that spatial heterogeneity. More than a thousand producers (893 beekeepers and 115 meliponicultors) participated of thesurvey during 2016-2017. The spatial scale of the responses included the complete latitudinal gradient of Latin America, i.e. from Mexicoto Argentina, encompassing a broad range of climates and altitudes. While meliponiculture activities (the keeping of colonies of stinglessbee species) were biogeographically restricted to sub-tropical and tropical regions with high rainfall and high temperature, beekeeping(the management of Western honey bee Apis mellifera colonies) was widely distributed over the climatic range. Interestingly, honey beeand stingless bee colony mortalities were not homogeneously distributed across the region. Here, we will discuss our results in relationto various potential drivers of colony loss that could explain the patterns we uncovered. We will specifically test the respective effectof environmental variables (climate, altitude, landscape), operation size, disease incidence (two well-established drivers of bee colonymortality in the Northern Hemisphere), and their interactions. We will be interested in exploring how the already identified drivers of colonyloss (e.g. operation size, disease incidence) are representative in this region or either new drivers emerge due to unique characteristicsof the data context (e.g. climate, altitude, landscape). These results will help our understanding of the processes involved in bee colonymortality, as well as provide tools for risk assessment for apiculture and meliponiculture.