Honey bee success predicted by landscape composition in Ohio, USA
- Published
- Accepted
- Subject Areas
- Agricultural Science, Ecology, Entomology, Coupled Natural and Human Systems
- Keywords
- apiculture, pollinator, citizen-science, urban beekeeping, landscape ecology
- Copyright
- © 2015 Sponsler et al.
- Licence
- This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ PrePrints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
- Cite this article
- 2015. Honey bee success predicted by landscape composition in Ohio, USA. PeerJ PrePrints 3:e795v1 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.795v1
Abstract
Foraging honey bees (Apis mellifera L.) routinely travel as far as several kilometers from their hive in the process of collecting nectar and pollen from floral patches within the surrounding landscape. Since the availability of floral resources at the landscape scale is a function of landscape composition, apiculturists have long recognized that landscape composition is a critical determinant of honey bee colony success. Nevertheless, we are aware of no published studies that present quantitative data relating colony success metrics to local landscape composition. We employed a beekeeper survey in conjunction with GIS-based landscape analysis to model colony success as a function of landscape composition in the State of Ohio, USA, a region characterized by intensive cropland, urban development, deciduous forest, and grassland. We found that colony food accumulation and wax production were positively related to cropland and negatively related to forest and grassland, a pattern that may be driven by the abundance of dandelion and clovers in agricultural areas compared to forest or mature grassland. Colony food accumulation was also negatively correlated with the ratio of urban:crop area in sites dominated by urban and agricultural land cover, which does not support the popular opinion that the urban environment is more favorable to honey bees than cropland.
Author Comment
This is a submission to PeerJ for review.
Supplemental Information
S1: Spring survey
Full spring survey questionnaire filled out by beekeepers in our study.
S2: Fall survey
Full fall survey questionnaire filled out by beekeepers in our study.