Summer weather conditions influence winter survival of honey bees (Apis mellifera) in the northeastern United States.

ABSTRACT: Honey bees are crucial pollinators for agricultural and natural ecosystems, but are experiencing heavy mortality in North America and Europe due to a complex suite of factors. Understanding the relative importance of each factor would enable beekeepers to make more informed decisions and improve assessment of local and regional habitat suitability. We used 3 years of Pennsylvania beekeepers' survey data to assess the importance of weather, topography, land use, and management factors on overwintering mortality at both apiary and colony levels, and to predict survival given current weather conditions and projected climate changes. Random Forest, a tree-based machine learning approach suited to describing complex nonlinear relationships among factors, was used. A Random Forest model predicte

SUBMITTER: Calovi M 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7811010 | biostudies-literature | 2021 Jan

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature