Sarah K French, Mateus Pepinelli, Ida M Conflitti, Aidan Jamieson, Heather Higo, Julia Common, Elizabeth M Walsh, Miriam Bixby, M Marta Guarna, Stephen F Pernal, Shelley E Hoover, Robert W Currie, Pierre Giovenazzo, Ernesto Guzman-Novoa, Daniel Borges, Leonard J Foster, Amro Zayed
Honey bees play a major role in crop pollination but have experienced declining health throughout most of the globe. Despite decades of research on key honey bee stressors (e.g., parasitic Varroa destructor mites and viruses), researchers cannot fully explain or predict colony mortality, potentially because it is caused by exposure to multiple interacting stressors in the field. Understanding which honey bee stressors co-occur and have the potential to interact is therefore of profound importance. Here, we used the emerging field of systems theory to characterize the stressor networks found in honey bee colonies after they were placed in fields containing economically valuable crops across Canada...
April 15, 2024: Current Biology: CB