Preliminary analysis of loss rates of honey bee colonies during winter 2015/16 from the COLOSS survey

By Robert Brodschneider, A. Gray, Romée van der Zee, N. Adjlane, V. Brusbardis, J. Charrière, R. Chlebo, M. Coffey, Karl Crailsheim, B. Dahle and 28 more. 2016

95 citations recorded by the source corpus.

In this short note we present comparable loss rates of honey bee colonies during winter 2015/16 from 29 countries, obtained with the COLOSS questionnaire. Altogether, we received valid answers from 19,952 beekeepers. These beekeepers collectively wintered 421,238 colonies, and reported 18,587 colonies with unsolvable queen problems and 32,048 dead colonies after winter. This gives an overall loss rate of 12.0% (95% confidence interval 11.8–12.2%) during winter 2015/16, with marked differences among countries. Beekeepers in the present study assessed 7.6% (95% CI 7.4–7.8%) of their colonies as dead or empty, and 4.4% (95% CI 4.3–4.5%) as having unsolvable queen problems after winter. The overall analysis showed that small operations suffered higher losses than larger ones. A table with detailed results and a map showing response and relative risks at regional level are presented.

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

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/9ec9d7c0b6f839abd1ac83d7a4b98301c61d0233

How researchers see this paper

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In Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics

1. Robert Brodschneider
2. L. Garibaldi
3. N. Simon-Delso
4. F. Requier
5. C. Morales
6. M. Aizen

In Genetics

1. N. Simon-Delso
2. L. Garibaldi
3. Robert Brodschneider

In Insect Science

1. Robert Brodschneider
2. N. Simon-Delso
3. L. Garibaldi
4. C. Morales

Citations in the corpus

• Multi-country loss rates of honey bee colonies during winter 2016/2017 from the COLOSS survey (2018, background): “We were able to verify our findings from last year, that beekeeping operations with 50 or fewer colonies experience higher total winter losses in the overall analysis (p < 0.001; Brodschneider et al., 2016).”
• Trends in beekeeping and honey bee colony losses in Latin America (2018, background): “Among the most renowned ones, the Bee Informed Partnership has developed a national monitoring program in USA carried out annually since 2007 (Kulhanek et al., 2017), while the honey bee research association COLOSS (Brodschneider et al., 2016) and the EPILOBEE consortium (Jacques et al., Correspondi”