New Paper: Management history and viral load in honey bee colonies.

Work out from my PhD & first postdoc exploring an opportunistic study opportunity, where we compared the viral loads of bees in three apiaries sources from either ‘industrial’ migratory beekeeping, ‘traditional’ beekeeping, or wild-caught swarms from remote wilderness areas.

You can read and access the paper via my website here or directly here [open access paper].

In short, we found that even after a full year of identical management, colonies from the industrial, migratory beekeeping source had universally higher viral loads than those from the traditional, small-scale, local beekeeper source. Feral colonies, predicted to perhaps have the lowest of all, actually showed qualitatively different viral load patterns; feral colonies had the highest loads for some viruses and the lowest for others, hinting at upcoming work of mine on the evolution of tolerance in this system,

We’re hopeful this first exploratory study can be used to justify much more thorough, expansive, experimental approaches to understanding how management regime impacts the long term health of honeybee colonies subjected to different beekeeping operations, and what that means for the role these colonies play as they move around the U.S. both as migratory beekeeping and as shipped packages (pictured) or nucs.

A fantastic undergrad currently working with me, Ethan Hackmeyer, wrote a layperson summary of this work you can read here.