Industrial bees: The impact of apicultural intensification on local disease prevalence.

ABSTRACT: It is generally thought that the intensification of farming will result in higher disease prevalences, although there is little specific modelling testing this idea. Focussing on honeybees, we build multi-colony models to inform how "apicultural intensification" is predicted to impact honeybee pathogen epidemiology at the apiary scale.We used both agent-based and analytical models to show that three linked aspects of apicultural intensification (increased population sizes, changes in population network structure and increased between-colony transmission) are unlikely to greatly increase disease prevalence in apiaries. Principally this is because even low-intensity apiculture exhibits high disease prevalence.The greatest impacts of apicultural intensification are found for diseases with rel

SUBMITTER: Bartlett LJ 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6771535 | biostudies-literature | 2019 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature