Anthropogenic land-use changes as a key challenge for honeybee foraging and health

近年来，人们对蜜蜂的兴趣一直在增长，主要是因为人们已经清楚地认识到，蜜蜂在现代世界中的处境越来越艰难，而人类对授粉者数量和多样性的下降负有责任并受到影响。蜜蜂（Apis mellifera）是对许多农作物和天然植物特别重要的传粉者，但蜂群数量下降或停滞，加上对蜜蜂授粉作物的依赖日益增加，导致人们对其授粉服务的担忧在许多地区，包括英国。蜜蜂在现代世界面临着许多新的挑战，包括杀虫剂，气候变化和新出现的疾病。一个关键的挑战是环境的迅速变化，主要是自然和半自然土地变成城市或集约耕作的土地。蜜蜂可能在许多现代景观中再也找不到足够的食物。这导致营养紧张，这与增加对疾病和寄生虫的易感性有关。由于蜜蜂疾病可以蔓延到野生蜜蜂，蜜蜂健康状况不佳是一个更广泛的流行病学问题，为保护传粉者社区。蜂群营养不良的一个潜在的重要原因是蜜蜂独特的觅食方法，但尚未探索。蜜蜂用著名的摇摆舞来交流高质量的食物来源。卡尔·冯·弗里施（Karl von Frisch）获得了诺贝尔奖，他发现蜜蜂在跳舞时会将食物来源的方向和距离信息传递给周围的蜜蜂。他称之为“舞蹈语言”。这种交流有助于蜂群利用环境中最好的食物来源，但它本身也很耗时，因为其他蜜蜂在蜂巢内等待舞蹈信息。计算机模拟和实证研究表明，“舞蹈语言”可能不利于殖民地在某些栖息地的成功，可能导致营养不良的状态。我们提出了一个雄心勃勃的实验方法来测试的假设，蜜蜂的“舞蹈语言”不再是有益的，在许多现代景观，并显着有助于营养压力和健康状况不佳。我们将中断舞蹈交流，并测量这如何影响收集的食物来源的数量和多样性以及不同景观类型中殖民地的健康-（1）城市，（2）农业和（3）半自然-在英格兰西南部的24个不同地点。具体来说，我们将探讨土地利用和通信如何影响英国蜂群损失的重要驱动因素的流行，包括瓦螨和变形翼病毒（DWV）。下一代测序将用于测试不同的实验条件如何影响健康相关基因的表达，实验室学习测试将确定蜜蜂的认知能力是否与土地使用、通信处理和蜂群的营养状态有关。这些结果有望改变我们对人类土地利用如何影响蜜蜂利用食物来源能力的理解，并使我们能够预测人为景观变化将如何影响蜜蜂健康。

Interest in bees has been growing in recent years, mainly because it has become clear that bees are having an increasingly hard time in the modern world and that humans are responsible for, and affected by, a decline in the number and diversity of pollinators. The honeybee (Apis mellifera) is a pollinator of particular importance for many agricultural crops and natural plants, but declining or stagnating colony numbers, in combination with an increasing reliance on bee-pollinated crops, have led to worries about their pollination services in many areas, including the UK. Honeybees face numerous new challenges in our modern world, including pesticides, climate change and emerging diseases. A key challenge is rapid environmental change, mainly the conversion of natural and semi-natural land into urban or intensively farmed land. Honeybees might simply no longer find enough food in many modern landscapes. This results in nutritional stress, which is linked to increased susceptibility to diseases and parasites. Since honeybee diseases can spill over to wild bees, poor honeybee health is of a wider epidemiological concern for the conservation of pollinator communities. A potentially important, but unexplored reason for poor colony nutrition is the honeybee's unique foraging method. Honeybees use the famous waggle dance to communicate about high-quality food sources. Karl von Frisch made the Nobel Prize-winning discovery that, while dancing, bees transmit information about the direction and distance of the food source to surrounding bees. He called this the "dance language". This communication helps colonies to exploit the best food sources in their environment, but it is also inherently time-consuming because other bees wait inside the hive for dance information. Computer simulations and empirical research have demonstrated that the "dance language" can be detrimental to colony success in some habitats, potentially resulting in a poor nutritional state. We propose an ambitious experimental approach to test the hypothesis that the honeybee "dance language" is no longer beneficial in many modern landscapes and significantly contributes to nutritional stress and poor health. We will interrupt dance communication and measure how this affects the quantity and diversity of collected food sources and the health of colonies in different landscape types - (1) urban, (2) agricultural and (3) semi-natural - in 24 different sites across the southwest of England. Specifically, we will explore how land-use and communication affect the prevalence of important drivers of honeybee colony loss in the UK, including Varroa mites and deformed wing virus (DWV). Next-generation-sequencing will be used to test how the different experimental conditions affect the expression of health-relevant genes and laboratory learning tests will establish whether the cognitive performance of bees is related to land-use, communication treatment and the nutritional state of colonies. The results are expected to transform our understanding of how anthropogenic land-use affects the ability of honeybees to exploit food sources and they will allow us to predict how anthropogenic landscape changes will affect bee health.