About a third of every bite of food consumed relies on pollination by honey bees. Ecological implications of the decline of bee pollinators became a matter of public concern with the recent devastating losses of honey bee colonies associated with Colony Collapse Disorder. As a result, the 2008 Farm Bill for the first time established pollinator conservation as a national priority. The Northern Great Plains provides important landscapes for maintaining honey bee colonies and for agricultural pollination services at local and national scales. Long summer days and grasslands rich in flowering species, especially legumes, provide the ideal mix of pollen and nectar sources required by bees for healthy nutrition and for long foraging periods that result in record honey crops. Lands in the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) are prime sources for this vegetation. Certain agricultural crops, such as oil seed sunflowers, canola, and alfalfa, also are beneficial for bees. When the growing season comes to an end in this part of the country, bee hives generally are shipped to states such as California, Georgia, and Florida to pollinate fruit, nut, and other crops worth more than $20 billion annually. Transporting bees around the country exposes them to multiple stressors, including pesticides, nutrient-limited monoculture diets, other bees that may be carrying diseases or parasites, and the stress of the long-distance move, itself. We hypothesize bees having good nutritional health prior to being shipped around the country will be more resistant to disease and stressors while providing national pollination services. We think this healthy nutritional status can be attained through appropriate land-cover configurations around hives.
Results/Conclusions
We prototyped an approach to classify landscape suitability for honey bees in the Northern Great Plains and validated the link between landscape versus honey production and bee health. The importance of CRP lands is evident from our initial results, providing critical habitat in areas extensively planted in crops not beneficial for bees. As we homogenize the landscape to maximize some agricultural goals, we remove the variety of floral species important to honey bees and impact our ability to meet other agricultural goals. Landscape features that favor honey bees also favor native biota, including amphibians, birds, and mammals, but because honey bees are so intimately woven into American agriculture, they provide a means to quantify economic impacts of broad-scale land-use change.
