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Honeybees and frenemies
Twelve-year-old Flor faces problems at home while spending a summer working at her parents' store, partnering with former friend Candice for a pageant, and volunteering with a reclusive beekeeper.
Book
Technical efficiency, energy balance, and economic analysis of honey production in Bingöl, Turkey
The aim of this study was to evaluate the technical efficiency, energy balance and economic analysis of honey production in Bingöl province, Turkey. Data were collected through face-to-face interviews with 94 honey producers, using proportional sampling to determine the sample selection. The technical efficiency of honey production was evaluated using stochastic frontier analysis. The results showed energy efficiency scores of 0.27, 0.16 and 0.11 for the respective groups. It was observed that the proportion of direct energy inputs was lower than that of indirect energy, with fuel identified as the primary energy input. The benefit-cost ratio for beekeeping was found to be 1.35. For honey production, the gross income per unit of energy was calculated to be 14.5₺, resulting in a net income of 3.86₺. In addition, the gross income per unit of energy for the farms surveyed was 2.49₺, with a net income of 0.65₺. Despite the unfavourable energy input-output ratios, the enterprises studied were considered sustainable in terms of energy costs and gross income. The efficiency analysis yielded technical efficiency scores of 0.83, 0.86 and 0.90 for the respective groups, indicating that the third group of enterprises used inputs in honey production more effectively. To improve the overall efficiency of honey production in Bingöl province, an increase in the number of hives is recommended and adopting modern beekeeping techniques is essential to improve energy efficiency.
Journal Article
A pan-European epidemiological study reveals honey bee colony survival depends on beekeeper education and disease control
Reports of honey bee population decline has spurred many national efforts to understand the extent of the problem and to identify causative or associated factors. However, our collective understanding of the factors has been hampered by a lack of joined up trans-national effort. Moreover, the impacts of beekeeper knowledge and beekeeping management practices have often been overlooked, despite honey bees being a managed pollinator. Here, we established a standardised active monitoring network for 5 798 apiaries over two consecutive years to quantify honey bee colony mortality across 17 European countries. Our data demonstrate that overwinter losses ranged between 2% and 32%, and that high summer losses were likely to follow high winter losses. Multivariate Poisson regression models revealed that hobbyist beekeepers with small apiaries and little experience in beekeeping had double the winter mortality rate when compared to professional beekeepers. Furthermore, honey bees kept by professional beekeepers never showed signs of disease, unlike apiaries from hobbyist beekeepers that had symptoms of bacterial infection and heavy Varroa infestation. Our data highlight beekeeper background and apicultural practices as major drivers of honey bee colony losses. The benefits of conducting trans-national monitoring schemes and improving beekeeper training are discussed.
Journal Article
Health status of honey bee colonies (Apis mellifera) and disease-related risk factors for colony losses in Austria
Austrian beekeepers frequently suffered severe colony losses during the last decade similar to trends all over Europe. This first surveillance study aimed to describe the health status of Austrian bee colonies and to analyze the reasons for losses for both the summer and winter season in Austria. In this study 189 apiaries all over Austria were selected using a stratified random sampling approach and inspected three times between July 2015 and spring 2016 by trained bee inspectors. The inspectors made interviews with the beekeepers about their beekeeping practice and the history of the involved colonies. They inspected a total of 1596 colonies for symptoms of nine bee pests and diseases (four of them notifiable diseases) and took bee samples for varroa mite infestation analysis. The most frequently detected diseases were three brood diseases: Varroosis, Chalkbrood and Sacbrood. The notifiable bee pests Aethina tumida and Tropilaelaps spp. were not detected. During the study period 10.8% of the 1596 observed colonies died. Winter proved to be the most critical season, in which 75% of the reported colony losses happened. Risks for suffering summer losses increased significantly, when colonies were weak in July, had queen problems or a high varroa mite infestation level on bees in July. Risks for suffering winter losses increased significantly, when the colonies had a high varroa mite infestation level on bees in September, were weak in September, had a queen older than one year or the beekeeper had few years of beekeeping experience. However, the effect of a high varroa mite infestation level in September had by far the greatest potential to raise the winter losses compared to the other significant factors.
Journal Article
Honey bee colony losses and causes during the active beekeeping season 2022/2023 in nine Sub-Saharan African countries
This study reports for the first-time a multi-country survey of managed honey bee colony loss rates and associated risk factors during the active beekeeping season 2022/2023 in nine Sub-Saharan African countries, namely Kenya, Ethiopia, Rwanda, Uganda, Benin, Liberia, Nigeria, Cameroon and Democratic Republic of the Congo. It also evaluates the sustainability of bee swarm catches as a primary source for expanding apiary size by African beekeepers. In this survey, the 1,786 interviewed beekeepers across these countries collectively managing 41,761 colonies registered an overall loss rate of 21.3%, which varied significantly among countries (from 9.7 to 45.3%) and hive types (from 10.6% in hives with movable frames to 17.9% in frameless hives). The perceived causes of losses in order of significance were issues beyond the beekeeper’s control (mostly theft, drought, and bushfire), absconding and pests (mostly wax moth, small and large hive beetles, ants and Varroa destructor mite), but this pattern varied greatly across countries. Among the management practices and characteristics, migratory beekeepers and professional beekeepers experienced lower losses than beekeepers practicing stationary beekeeping and semi-professionals and hobby beekeepers, respectively. Insights into the number of bee swarms caught revealed a significant decrease in swarm availability over the past three years in Kenya, while some regions in Ethiopia showed the opposite trend, requiring further investigation. Overall, this comprehensive survey highlights the complexities and challenges faced by beekeepers in Sub-Saharan Africa, underscoring the need for targeted interventions and sustained research to support the resilience and growth of the apicultural sector.
Journal Article
African Forest Honey: an Overlooked NTFP with Potential to Support Livelihoods and Forests
In parts of the developing world, deforestation rates are high and poverty is chronic and pervasive. Addressing these issues through the commercialization of non-timber forest products (NTFPs) has been widely researched, tested, and discussed. While the evidence is inconclusive, there is growing understanding of what works and why, and this paper examines the acknowledged success and failure factors. African forest honey has been relatively overlooked as an NTFP, an oversight this paper addresses. Drawing on evidence from a long-established forest conservation, livelihoods, and trade development initiative in SW Ethiopia, forest honey is benchmarked against accepted success and failure factors and is found to be a near-perfect NTFP. The criteria are primarily focused on livelihood impacts and consequently this paper makes recommendations for additional criteria directly related to forest maintenance.
Journal Article
Beekeepers’ perceptions toward a new omics tool for monitoring bee health in Europe
Pressures on honey bee health have substantially increased both colony mortality and beekeepers’ costs for hive management across Europe. Although technological advances could offer cost-effective solutions to these challenges, there is little research into the incentives and barriers to technological adoption by beekeepers in Europe. Our study is the first to investigate beekeepers’ willingness to adopt the Bee Health Card, a molecular diagnostic tool developed within the PoshBee EU project which can rapidly assess bee health by monitoring molecular changes in bees. The Bee Health Card, based on MALDI BeeTyping®, is currently on level six of the Technology Readiness Level scale, meaning that the technology has been demonstrated in relevant environments. Using an on-line survey from seven European countries, we show that beekeepers recognise the potential for the tool to improve colony health, and that targeted economic incentives, such as subsidises, may help reduce cost being a barrier to the adoption and frequent use of the tool. Based on the description of the tool, 43% of beekeepers appear to be moderately confident in the effectiveness of the Bee Health Card. This confidence could increase if the tool was easy to use and not time consuming, and a higher confidence could also contribute to raising the probability of accepting extra costs linked to it. We estimate that, in the worst-case scenario, the cost per single use of the Bee Health Card should be between €47–90 across a range of European countries, depending on the labour and postage costs. However, the monetary benefits in terms of honey production could exceed this. In order to successfully tackle colony health issues, it is recommended using the BHC five times per year, from the end to the beginning of winter. Finally, we discuss the knowledge needs for assessing beekeeper health tools in future research.
Journal Article
Application of A Precision Apiculture System to Monitor Honey Daily Production
Precision beekeeping or precision apiculture is an apiary management strategy based on the monitoring of individual bee colonies to minimize resource consumption and maximize the productivity of bees. Bees play a fundamental role in ensuring pollination; they can also be considered as indicators of the state of pollution and are used as bio monitors. Beekeeping needs continuous monitoring of the animals and can benefit from advanced intelligent ambiance technologies. The aim of this study was the design of a precision apiculture system (PAS) platform for monitoring and controlling the following environmental parameters: wind, temperature, and relative humidity inside and outside the hive, in order to assess their influence on honey production. PAS is based on an Arduino board with an Atmel microcontroller, and the connection of a load cell for recording the weight of the hive, relative humidity and temperature sensor inside the hive, and relative humidity and temperature sensor outside the hive using an anemometer. PAS was installed in common hives and placed in an open field in a French honeysuckle plot; the system was developed to operate in continuous mode, monitoring the period of 24 April–1 June 2019. Temperature was constant in the monitored period, around 35 °C, inside the hive, proving that no criticalities occurred regarding swarming or absconding. In the period between 24 and 28 May, a lack of honey production was recorded, attributed to a lowering of the external temperature. PAS was useful to point out the eventual reduction in honey production due to wind; several peaks of windiness exceeding 5 m s−1 were recorded, noting that honey production decreases with the peaks in wind. Therefore, the data recorded by PAS platform provided a valid decisional support to the operator. It can be implemented by inserting additional sensors for detecting other parameters, such as rain or sound.
Journal Article
Comparative Study of Machine Learning Models for Bee Colony Acoustic Pattern Classification on Low Computational Resources
In precision beekeeping, the automatic recognition of colony states to assess the health status of bee colonies with dedicated hardware is an important challenge for researchers, and the use of machine learning (ML) models to predict acoustic patterns has increased attention. In this work, five classification ML algorithms were compared to find a model with the best performance and the lowest computational cost for identifying colony states by analyzing acoustic patterns. Several metrics were computed to evaluate the performance of the models, and the code execution time was measured (in the training and testing process) as a CPU usage measure. Furthermore, a simple and efficient methodology for dataset prepossessing is presented; this allows the possibility to train and test the models in very short times on limited resources hardware, such as the Raspberry Pi computer, moreover, achieving a high classification performance (above 95%) in all the ML models. The aim is to reduce power consumption and improves the battery life on a monitor system for automatic recognition of bee colony states.
Journal Article
Honey production, an economic alternative for coastal areas with mangrove ecosystems: a case study in Sabancuy, Campeche, southeastern Mexico
Background
Mangrove ecosystems recognized for their biodiversity and ecosystem services that offer unique opportunities for sustainable livelihoods such as honey production. This study characterizes the beekeeping practices associated with mangroves in Sabancuy, Campeche, Mexico, emphasizing their ecological and economic significance.
Methods
Through 28 semi-structured surveys, we have analyzed the socioeconomic and ecological perspectives of the local beekeepers operating in these coastal environments. The surveyed beekeepers, with an average age of 49 years and 23.6 years of experience, primarily engage in complementary honey production, leveraging both migratory and stationary apiary systems. Hive management practices include queen replacement, artificial feeding, colony division, and adherence to organic certification protocols.
Results
The study highlights an annual average honey production of 65.37 kg per colony, with peak yields occurring during the transition from dry to rainy seasons (May–June). Integrating floral phenology and phylogenetic frameworks the principal plant resources supporting honeybees, enhancing the sustainability of the mangrove-based beekeeping.
Conclusion
Apiculture not only produces economic opportunities for the local communities; but also contributes to conservation goals by fostering biodiversity and ecosystem restoration. These findings underscore the potential of mangrove beekeeping as a replicable model for sustainable development in other coastal regions worldwide with similar ecosystems. Furthermore, this research seeks to bridge critical knowledge gaps about
Apis mellifera
in mangrove ecosystems by addressing socio-ecological factors influencing honey production, evaluating its benefits for local communities, and exploring its role within broader conservation strategies.
Journal Article