Performing Department
(N/A)
Non Technical Summary
European Foulbrood (EFB), a disease that infects honey bee larvae and causes significant mortality, has recently increased in prevalence and intensity. High incidences are associated with pollination of early season specialty crops, which reduces efficiency in pollination of specialty crops that bloom later in the season. This project uses a systemand transdisciplinary based approach to identify factors associated with EFB, develop strategies to mitigate its spread and impacts, and communicate findings to beekeepers and growers of diverse specialty crops. The objectives of this study are: (1) determine factors associated with EFB(2) evaluate methods to mitigate EFB(3) investigate the genetic variation of the pathogen population and identify potential pathways for disease spread(4) develop economic models on the impact, and (5) develop management practices and communicate findings. Central to this project is a two year long longitudinal study involving honey bee colonies across four states that will be used to pollinate diverse crops. The project will model the effects of crops, weather conditions, pesticides, honey bee health, and others on EFB. This project will also use methods in microbiome science and genomics to determine the efficacy of probiotics and trace pathogen movement, respectively, as well as evaluate other management strategies. Findings, along with results from economic analyses will be disseminated broadly via a diversity of outreach and extension mechanisms, including YouTube videos and podcasts.
Animal Health Component
40%
Research Effort Categories
Basic
40%
Applied
40%
Developmental
20%
Goals / Objectives
The long-term goal of this proposal is to elucidate causal factors associated with Europen foulbrood (EFB) disease in honey bees and develop strategies to mitigate this disease. Following are the specific objectives: (1) evaluate factors hypothesized to contribute to EFB, (2) evaluate various methods to mitigate EFB (probiotics, comb replacement, colony division, antibiotic treatment timing), (3) use a large-scale, high-resolution, genome-guided approach to understand the diversity and ecology of M. plutonius in honey bee colonies pollinating specialty crops, (4) estimate the economic impact of EFB on beekeepers and the costs of offering pollination services to specialty crop producers and (5) develop effective EFB management practices and deliver them via comprehensive outreach and Extension program to ensure adoption.A transdisciplinary, comprehensive, and systematic multistate longitudinal monitoring study will be conducted to examine several factors hypothesized to influence EFB incidence.
Project Methods
During the first two years of the project, wewill survey four commercial beekeepers in each state (CA, MS, OR and WA) that rent colonies for specialty crop pollination and who also have had moderate to high levels of EFB in their operation over the past three years. The survey will begin when the colonies are pollinating almonds in February 2024 and will be completed when the colonies finish pollination in February 2026. Each collaborating beekeeper will allocate 96 randomly selected colonies (96 colonies x 4 beekeepers x 4 states = 1536 colonies) that we will track across the study. After almond pollination, 48 from each beekeeper will be placed in blueberry fields in each of the four states and the other half will be placed in a holding yard or in specialty crop "X" (other than blueberries) in bloom. Next, colonies from blueberry fields and "X" fields will be moved to the next specialty crop "Y" needing pollination (based on collaborating beekeepers' routine pollination contracts in each state; 1536 colonies). When done with pollination of this specialty crop the colonies will then be placed in the next specialty crop "Z" in the pollination sequence needing pollination in respective states (CA, MS, OR and WA). Finally, all the experimental colonies located in all four states will be transported back to California for next year's (2025) almond pollination for a second year. Each year, colonies will be surveyed at the beginning and end of each placement period. Follwing parameters will be measured: (i) colony population and survival(ii) clinical and sub-clinical levels of EFB disease (iii) pollen quality, diversity, nutrition and pesticide contamination (iv)vitellogenin gene expression in bees (v) adult hindgut and larval microbiota (vi) prevailing weather variables (vii) landscape composition.In Year 3, we will evaluate novel and currently avialable EFB management techniques by conducting a 16-month experiment with four commercial beekeeping operations in Oregon and Washington.Prior to the start of the experiment we will identify colonies in each operation with the highest M. plutonius loads. Upon arrival in California for almond pollination, colonies with the highest disease loads will be inspected to ensure they are uniform in population and then grouped on pallets and randomly assigned to seven to ten treatment groups. Experimental colonies will be assessed for population and survival as well as for subclinical and clinical EFB. A beekeepers survey for estimation of treatment costs will also be done.We will sequence and analyze whole genomes of EFB strains collected from the two year longitudinal study descibed above.To estimate the economic impacts of EFB on beekeepers and specialty crop producers, we will evaluate the direct costs of higher bee mortality rates, the costs of strengthening weak colonies, the expense of antibiotics to treat the diseases, and the value of forgone honey yield and pollinator fees. Farm enterprise budgeting techniqueswill be used for the analysis.We will also evaluate the costs, efficacy, and profitability of the EFB mitigation approaches that are developed in this project using both partial budgeting techniques and the dynamic programming model.To disseminate information generated from activities proposed above into the hands of beekeepers and determine the best methods to encourage adoption of tools, we will develop a comprehensive outreach and extension program.