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

FABRICE REQUIER; KARINA ANTÚNEZ; LUCAS ALEJANDRO GARIBALDI; CAROLINA L MORALES

Montreal

Congreso; 46th Apimondia - International Apicultural Congress; 2019

Large-scalemonitoring programs applied to bees have allowed researchers topinpoint the effects of climate change on the current patterns ofdecline in wild and managed bee populations in the United States andacross Europe. Consequently, detailed knowledge on the bee declinepatterns was restricted to these latitudes and to the specificclimatic and environmental contexts of the Northern hemisphere. Weperformed the first large-scale, volunteer-based survey, to monitorhoney bee and stingless bee (Tribu Meliponini) colony losses acrossLatin America. We aimed to describe the geographic patterns of beemortality and explore the climatic, health and management driversunderlying that spatial heterogeneity. More than a thousand producers(893 beekeepers and 115 meliponicultors) participated of the surveyduring 2016-2017. The spatial scale of the responses included thecomplete latitudinal gradient of Latin America, i.e. from Mexico toArgentina, encompassing a broad range of climates and altitudes.While meliponiculture activities (the keeping of colonies ofstingless bee species) were biogeographically restricted tosub-tropical and tropical regions with high rainfall and hightemperature, beekeeping (the management of Western honey bee Apismellifera colonies) was widely distributed over the climatic range.Interestingly, honey bee and stingless beecolony mortalities were not homogeneously distributed across theregion. Here, we will discuss our results in relation to variouspotential drivers of colony loss that could explain the patterns weuncovered. We will specifically test the respective effect ofenvironmental variables (climate, altitude, landscape), operationsize, disease incidence (two well-established drivers of bee colonymortality in the Northern Hemisphere), and their interactions. Wewill be interested in exploring how the already identified drivers ofcolony loss (e.g. operation size, disease incidence) arerepresentative in this region or either new drivers emerge due tounique 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 toolsfor risk assessment for apiculture and meliponiculture.p { margin-bottom: 0.25cm; line-height: 120%; }