nov-dec-2020

IN YOUR ORCHARD THE BEE BOX Beekeeper Best Management Practices Every spring, The Bee Informed Partnership (BIP) administers the Annual Colony Loss and Management Survey to beekeepers across the country. The survey began in 2006 to keep close track on U.S. honey bee colony mortality rates after many of the country’s beekeepers began reporting alarmingly high overwinter colony losses. The survey was amended a few years later to include questions about beekeeper management practices, in order to record trends in management strategies and evaluate the link between those practices and risk of colony mortality. As part of her Ph.D. thesis at University of Maryland’s Bee Research Lab, BIP’s Science Coordinator, Dr. Nathalie Steinhauer, in collaboration with Dr. Dennis vanEngelsdorp and Dr. Claude Saegerman, undertook a project to do just that. The group used the 18,791 loss and management survey responses collected between 2012–2015 to measure the relative impact of different management practices on colony health outcomes, which has been recently published in the journal The Science of the Total Environment (vol. 753). The beekeeper survey respondents reported information about their use of 82 unique practices that span the range of beekeeper management categories — from handling equipment to feeding, queen management, and Varroa control practices. With the assistance of 14 honey bee health and epidemiology experts, each management practice was assigned a score, which allowed the researchers to calculate a total score for each beekeeper reflecting how closely their overall management practices reflected expert opinion of “best practices.” In short, the higher the score, the closer beekeeper management practices aligned with what the experts thought best. Were the Experts Correct? Now equipped with an index of management practice “quality” (at least according to expert opinion), Dr. Steinhauer et al . then wanted to test if this index correlated with higher colony survival rates. Were the beekeepers that experts identified as using “best” management practices also experiencing the lowest losses ? Indeed, beekeepers reporting combined management practices that more closely mirrored expert recommendations experienced lower colony loss rates than the yearly average loss rate. Figure 1: Percent Colony Losses in the Summer, Winter and Annually from 2008 until now. 4 0 A L M O N D F A C T S