Disease associations between honeybees and bumblebees as a threat to wild pollinators

By M. Fürst, D. McMahon, J. Osborne, R. Paxton, Mark J. F. Brown. Nature, 2014

665 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Emerging infectious diseases (EIDs) pose a risk to human welfare, both directly and indirectly, by affecting managed livestock and wildlife that provide valuable resources and ecosystem services, such as the pollination of crops. Honeybees (Apis mellifera), the prevailing managed insect crop pollinator, suffer from a range of emerging and exotic high-impact pathogens, and population maintenance requires active management by beekeepers to control them. Wild pollinators such as bumblebees (Bombus spp.) are in global decline, one cause of which may be pathogen spillover from managed pollinators like honeybees or commercial colonies of bumblebees. Here we use a combination of infection experiments and landscape-scale field data to show that honeybee EIDs are indeed widespread infectious agents within the pollinator assemblage. The prevalence of deformed wing virus (DWV) and the exotic parasite Nosema ceranae in honeybees and bumblebees is linked; as honeybees have higher DWV prevalence, and sympatric bumblebees and honeybees are infected by the same DWV strains, Apis is the likely source of at least one major EID in wild pollinators. Lessons learned from vertebrates highlight the need for increased pathogen control in managed bee species to maintain wild pollinators, as declines in native pollinators may be caused by interspecies pathogen transmission originating from managed pollinators.

Subfields: Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics, Insect Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/4135d70706b3ca5a97291bed258f6cd690a50811

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics

1. S. Potts
2. J. Ollerton
3. R. Winfree
4. M. Aizen
5. L. Garibaldi
6. Colin Fontaine
7. Orianne Rollin
8. Élisa Thébault

In Insect Science

1. S. Potts
2. R. Winfree
3. J. Ollerton
4. M. Aizen
5. L. Garibaldi
6. Richard J. Gill
7. Orianne Rollin
8. T. Breeze

Citations in the corpus

• Protecting an ecosystem service: approaches to understanding and mitigating threats to wild insect pollinators (2016, background): “tested to screen bees for disease agents (Fürst et al., 2014; Graystock et al., 2014), these are 798”
• Safeguarding pollinators and their values to human well-being (2016, positive): “Although the epidemiology of pollinator communities needs to be studied, promoting good husbandry of managed bees will probably reduce pathogen spread across managed and wild bee populations 92 .”
• Gauging the Effect of Honey Bee Pollen Collection on Native Bee Communities (2017, background): “RNA viruses and some other honey bee pathogens have been recovered from neighboring wild bee communities; virus propagules were likely transmitted to native bees via pollen at shared floral hosts (e.g., Fürst et al. 2014).”
• ECOLOGY OF ORGANISMS IN URBAN ENVIRONMENTS Urban drivers of plant-pollinator interactions (2015, background): “Apis has been shown to affect plant–pollinator interactions negatively as disease reservoirs for wild pollinators (F€urst et al. 2014), but could potentially have positive effects through its role as a longseason supergeneralist that can rescue plants from other pollinator declines.”
• Nosema ceranae disease of the honey bee (Apis mellifera) (2018, background): “Infection with N. ceranae has also been found in several species of Bombus from China (Li et al. 2012), Argentina (Plischuk et al. 2009), and the UK (Graystock et al. 2013; Fürst et al. 2014), albeit at low to moderate prevalence.”
• Massively Introduced Managed Species and Their Consequences for Plant–Pollinator Interactions (2017, background): “The recent review of Graystock et al. (2016) reveals that pathogen spillover between pollinating MIMS and wild pollina- tors might be a strong cause of wild bee decline worldwide (see also F€urst et al., 2014; Meeus et al., 2011).”
• Pollination reservoirs for wild bee habitat enhancement in cropping systems: a review (2017, background): “Due to synergies (Brittain, Williams, et al. 2013), disease transmission (Furst et al. 2014), and other unknown factors, true replacement value can be difficult to measure.”