Investigating the role of landscape composition on honey bee colony winter mortality: A long-term analysis.

ABSTRACT: The health of honey bee colonies is, amongst others, affected by the amount, quality and diversity of available melliferous plants. Since landscape is highly diverse throughout Austria regarding the availability of nutritional resources, we used data from annual surveys on honey bee colony losses ranging over six years to analyse a possible relationship with land use. The data set comprises reports from a total of 6,655 beekeepers and 129,428 wintered honey bee colonies. Regions surrounding the beekeeping operations were assigned to one of six clusters according to their composition of land use categories by use of a hierarchical cluster analysis, allowing a rough distinction between urban regions, regions predominated by semi-natural areas and pastures, and mainly agricultural environment

SUBMITTER: Kuchling S 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6095838 | biostudies-literature | 2018 Aug

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature