Lewis Bartlett (UGA) presents "Evolutionary Beekeeping – Trade-Offs, Outcomes, and Dangers"12/4/2019 Illustration by Nina Sokolov Lewis has worked at University of Exeter, UC Berkeley, Emory University, and most recently UGA, to understand when and how we can gain novel insights into bee management by incorporating the ecology and evolution of disease. As will come as no surprise to most readers, bee populations (both managed and wild) are in rapid decline. This is due in part to pesticide use, changing land use patterns, and pest/pathogen expansion. In the case of monocropping, there is often a large burst of flowering (i.e. resources) at one point in time, followed by an absence of flowers for the rest of the season. For honey bee managers, this means they need many hives to take full advantage of the bloom, but are then stuck with hungry bees once the flowering is finished. This has, of course, led to movement of bees around the landscape. Such movement has had predictable impacts on the spread of pests and pathogens, both for the managed bees and for the wild populations with which they share habitat. Approximately 3/4 of the Honeybees in North America are moved around the country on trucks. Such industrial-scale bee keeping has brought with it numerous new challenges, especially in terms of disease spread. However, the silver lining of this is that new findings and emerging best practice in bee keeping can be rapidly implemented. In a recent ecological model (see here: https://besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/1365-2664.13461), Lewis and colleagues explored how hive orientation might impact pathogen spread by examining the impact of spatial structure on R0 (the number of secondary infections that result, on average, from a given infection in a susceptible population). As expected, prevalence (proportion infected) increases with increasing R0. They then find that the least intensified apiary (a linear array of about nine hives) has a lower predicted prevalence across the spectrum of R0 values than the intensified apiary (with 100s of hives in a grid), but the impact is not particularly strong. This is especially true at higher R0 values (where most estimates for bee pathogens exist). So, it seems like crowding alone can not explain the increased spread of disease being observed. Now broadening the focus beyond whether a bee is infected or not, Lewis turned his attention towards severity of infection. The problem, however, is that this will be affected by numerous inter-related factors, including pesticides, stress, and ecology. As a first test of this, Lewis brought feral (no management), traditionally managed, and industrially managed bees into a common garden for a year, then screened for viruses. He found some grouping of viruses by beekeeping history and higher viral titres on average in highly managed bees. However, feral bees carried much higher titres of many particular viruses. Finally, in terms of the much-hated varroa mites, which have recently emerged and wreaked havoc across the globe, previous work has shown that the presence/absence of the mite changes the prevalence of viral pathogens. As varroa spread across New Zealand, deformed wing virus increased in prevalence and severity (number of copies observed per bee). A similar pattern was observed in Hawaii. Interestingly, strain diversity rapidly decreased as well, leading to a single highly virulent strain dominating the landscape. This is most likely due to the success of this virus in the mite itself (see Campbell et al. 2016 for an elegant demonstration of this). Overall, it seems intuition does not get us far in this system - in part because of the many factors interacting to shape the ecology and evolution of disease in managed settings. Thank goodness for guidance from theory, diligent researchers, and people like Lewis who choose to spend their intellect and time focusing on solving these critical questions! Summary by Britt Koskella
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