Mitigating the anthropogenic spread of bee parasites to protect wild pollinators

By Dave Goulson, W. Hughes. 2015

107 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract Bees naturally suffer from a broad range of parasites, including mites, protozoans, bacteria, fungi and viruses. Some appear to be host-specific, but most appear able to infect multiple bee species, and some are found in insects outside of the Hymenoptera. The host range, natural geographic range and virulence in different hosts are poorly understood for most bee parasites. It is of considerable concern that the anthropogenic movement of bees species for crop pollination purposes has led to the accidental introduction of bee parasites to countries and continents where they do not naturally occur, exposing native bees to parasites against which they may have little resistance. In at least one instance, that of the South American bumble bee Bombus dahlbomii, this has led to a catastrophic population collapse. The main bees that are moved by man are the western honeybee, Apis mellifera, and two species of bumble bee, the European Bombus terrestris and the North American Bombus impatiens. We propose a range of mitigation strategies that could greatly reduce the risk of further impacts of the commercial bee trade on global bee health, including stricter controls on international movement of bees and improved hygiene and parasite screening of colonies before and after shipping.

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

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/83f9597abcd2aa66fc80680343d6e5ddf6cfc2e9

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. Colin Fontaine
2. Élisa Thébault
3. Mickaël Henry
4. I. Dajoz
5. Orianne Rollin
6. A. Sauve
7. Carsten F. Dormann
8. Rouven Strauss

In Genetics

1. Colin Fontaine
2. I. Dajoz
3. Élisa Thébault
4. Orianne Rollin

In Insect Science

1. Colin Fontaine
2. Mickaël Henry
3. I. Dajoz
4. Orianne Rollin

Citations in the corpus

• Massively Introduced Managed Species and Their Consequences for Plant–Pollinator Interactions (2017, background): “…does not produce honey, so it is used solely for pollination service in greenhouses, orchards (e.g. apples, pears, raspberry and avocado) or other highly valuable crops (e.g. peppers) to replace or supplement honeybee populations (Dafni et al., 2010; Goulson, 2003; Goulson and Hughes, 2015).”
• Protecting an ecosystem service: approaches to understanding and mitigating threats to wild insect pollinators (2016, unknown): “Metagenomics could be used to detect EIDs in wild pollinators, a 795 largely unknown and neglected system or even the spill-over of these diseases from managed 796 to wild pollinators (Goulson and Hughes, 2015).”