Читать книгу Honey Bee Medicine for the Veterinary Practitioner - Группа авторов - Страница 20

Colonies of honey bees living in the wild are prospering in American forests even in the face of myriad stressors that are decimating the managed colonies living in apiaries. We know that both cohorts are exposed to the same parasites and pathogens. How then do wild colonies survive without beekeeper inputs, whereas managed colonies live just one to two seasons if humans do not intervene with various supplements or medicines? In examining this conundrum, we must ask ourselves as bee doctors, working hand‐in‐hand with beekeepers, how we should examine the health of the honey bee? A fundamental tenet of medicine is the need to learn what is normal (regarding anatomy, physiology, or the state of being known as health) before one can understand deviations from this baseline. We contend that the “normal” that bee veterinarians should be concerned about is the wonderfully adapted lifestyle of wild colonies of honey bees. In this chapter, we will highlight the important differences between wild and managed colonies of honey bees and we will suggest ways health professionals can make use of the marvelous tools for health and survival that evolution has bestowed upon Apis mellifera through adaptation and natural selection.

Declines of the world's pollinators are happening at an alarming rate, and it is predicted that these declines will have adverse impacts on pollinator‐sensitive commodities worth billions of dollars (Morse and Calderone 2000). The threat to the honey bee is perhaps the best understood of the pollinator declines. Its causes are diverse: widespread use of agrochemicals, loss of plant and floral diversity, invasive species, migratory beekeeping practices, and monoculture pollen sources. Furthermore, the stresses created by these environmental stressors are intensified by the honey bee's pests, parasites, and pathogens. Although no single disease agent has been identified as the cause of honey bee colony collapse, pests and pathogens are recognized as the primary drivers of the massive deaths of managed bee colonies worldwide. Many of these agents of disease are vectored by an ectoparasitic mite introduced from Asia, Varroa destructor (Ellis et al. 2010; Ratnieks and Carreck 2010).

Investigations of honey bee declines have focused primarily on the pathogens themselves and their interactions, which are now understood to be multifactorial (vanEngelsdorp et al. 2009; Becher et al. 2013; Di Prisco et al. 2016). Besides the pathogens, the environments in which honey bees live also profoundly impact colony survival. In this chapter, we will examine honey bee health and the alarming levels of colony mortality from an ecological and evolutionary perspective. We will embrace the logic of natural selection and we will learn important lessons from long‐term studies of honey bee colonies living in nature (Brosi et al. 2017; Seeley 2017b, 2019a; Neumann and Blacquière 2016).