Institute of Economics & EMbeDS, Sant'Anna School of Advanced Studies, Pisa, 56127, Italy.
Geneva School of Economics and Management, University of Geneva, Geneva, 1205, Switzerland.
Sci Rep. 2022 Dec 1;12(1):20787. doi: 10.1038/s41598-022-24946-4.
Honey bee (Apis mellifera) colony loss is a widespread phenomenon with important economic and biological implications, whose drivers are still an open matter of investigation. We contribute to this line of research through a large-scale, multi-variable study combining multiple publicly accessible data sources. Specifically, we analyzed quarterly data covering the contiguous United States for the years 2015-2021, and combined open data on honey bee colony status and stressors, weather data, and land use. The different spatio-temporal resolutions of these data are addressed through an up-scaling approach that generates additional statistical features which capture more complex distributional characteristics and significantly improve modeling performance. Treating this expanded feature set with state-of-the-art feature selection methods, we obtained findings that, nation-wide, are in line with the current knowledge on the aggravating roles of Varroa destructor and pesticides in colony loss. Moreover, we found that extreme temperature and precipitation events, even when controlling for other factors, significantly impact colony loss. Overall, our results reveal the complexity of biotic and abiotic factors affecting managed honey bee colonies across the United States.
蜜蜂（Apis mellifera）种群损失是一种广泛存在的现象，具有重要的经济和生物学意义，其驱动因素仍在调查之中。我们通过一项大规模的多变量研究，结合多个公开可访问的数据源，为这一研究领域做出了贡献。具体来说，我们分析了 2015 年至 2021 年美国大陆的季度数据，并结合了蜜蜂种群状况和压力源、天气数据以及土地利用的公开数据。通过一种升尺度方法解决了这些数据的不同时空分辨率问题，该方法生成了额外的统计特征，这些特征可以捕捉更复杂的分布特征，并显著提高建模性能。使用最先进的特征选择方法处理这个扩展的特征集，我们得到了一些发现，这些发现表明，在全国范围内，与瓦螨和杀虫剂在蜂群损失中加剧作用的现有知识是一致的。此外，我们发现即使在控制其他因素的情况下，极端温度和降水事件也会对蜂群损失产生重大影响。总的来说，我们的研究结果揭示了影响美国管理中蜜蜂种群的生物和非生物因素的复杂性。
