VespAI: a deep learning-based system for the detection of invasive hornets.

The invasive hornet Vespa velutina nigrithorax is a rapidly proliferating threat to pollinators in Europe and East Asia. To effectively limit its spread, colonies must be detected and destroyed early in the invasion curve, however the current reliance upon visual alerts by the public yields low accuracy. Advances in deep learning offer a potential solution to this, but the application of such technology remains challenging.

Quantifying the impact of an invasive Hornet on Bombus terrestris Colonies.

The invasive hornet Vespa velutina nigrithorax is considered a proliferating threat to pollinators in Europe and Asia. While the impact of this species on managed honey bees is well-documented, effects upon other pollinator populations remain poorly understood. Nonetheless, dietary analyses indicate that the hornets consume a diversity of prey, fuelling concerns for at-risk taxa.

CropPol: A dynamic, open and global database on crop pollination.

Seventy five percent of the world's food crops benefit from insect pollination. Hence, there has been increased interest in how global change drivers impact this critical ecosystem service. Because standardized data on crop pollination are rarely available, we are limited in our capacity to understand the variation in pollination benefits to crop yield, as well as to anticipate changes in this service, develop predictions, and inform management actions.

Spatial extent of road pollution: A national analysis.

Roads form vast, pervasive and growing networks across the Earth, causing negative environmental impacts that spill out into a 'road-effect zone'. Previous research has estimated the regional and global extent of these zones using arbitrary distances, ignoring the spatial distribution and distance-dependent attenuation of different forms of road environmental impact. With Great Britain as a study area, we used mapping of roads and realistic estimates of how pollution levels decay with distance to project the spatial distribution of road pollution.

Honey bee colony performance affected by crop diversity and farmland structure: a modeling framework.

Forage availability has been suggested as one driver of the observed decline in honey bees. However, little is known about the effects of its spatiotemporal variation on colony success. We present a modeling framework for assessing honey bee colony viability in cropping systems.

Quantifying the relative predation pressure on bumblebee nests by the European badger () using artificial nests.

Bumblebee populations are declining. Factors that impact the size and success of colonies act by either limiting resource availability (bottom-up regulation) or causing mortality, for example, pesticides, disease, and possibly predation (top-down regulation). The impact of predation has not been quantified, and so, the current study used novel artificial nests as a proxy for wild bumblebee nests to quantify the relative predation pressure from badgers in two habitats: woodland and grassland, and at two nesting depths: surface and underground.

in a mass-flowering pollinator-dependent crop: A mutualistic relationship?

Bumblebees ( spp.) rely on an abundant and diverse selection of floral resources to meet their nutritional requirements. In farmed landscapes, mass-flowering crops can provide an important forage resource for bumblebees, with increased visitation from bumblebees into mass-flowering crops having an additional benefit to growers who require pollination services.

-BEEHAVE: A systems model for exploring multifactorial causes of bumblebee decline at individual, colony, population and community level.

World-wide declines in pollinators, including bumblebees, are attributed to a multitude of stressors such as habitat loss, resource availability, emerging viruses and parasites, exposure to pesticides, and climate change, operating at various spatial and temporal scales. Disentangling individual and interacting effects of these stressors, and understanding their impact at the individual, colony and population level are a challenge for systems ecology. Empirical testing of all combinations and contexts is not feasible.

Searching for nests of the invasive Asian hornet () using radio-telemetry.

Asian hornets () are voracious predators of bees, and are the latest emerging threat to managed and wild pollinator populations in Europe. To prevent establishment or reduce the rate of spread of , early detection and destruction of nests is considered the only option. Detection is difficult as their nests are well hidden and flying hornets are difficult to follow over long distances.

Monitoring Neonicotinoid Exposure for Bees in Rural and Peri-urban Areas of the U.K. during the Transition from Pre- to Post-moratorium.

Concerns regarding the impact of neonicotinoid exposure on bee populations recently led to an EU-wide moratorium on the use of certain neonicotinoids on flowering crops. Currently, evidence regarding the impact, if any, the moratorium has had on bees' exposure is limited. We sampled pollen and nectar from bumblebee colonies in rural and peri-urban habitats in three U.

Drought reduces floral resources for pollinators.

Climate change is predicted to result in increased occurrence and intensity of drought in many regions worldwide. By increasing plant physiological stress, drought is likely to affect the floral resources (flowers, nectar and pollen) that are available to pollinators. However, little is known about impacts of drought at the community level, nor whether plant community functional composition influences these impacts.

Courgette Production: Pollination Demand, Supply, and Value.

Courgette (Cucurbita pepo L.) production in the United Kingdom is estimated to be worth £6.7 million.

Oilseed rape () as a resource for farmland insect pollinators: quantifying floral traits in conventional varieties and breeding systems.

Oilseed rape (OSR; L.) is a major crop in temperate regions and provides an important source of nutrition to many of the yield-enhancing insect flower visitors that consume floral nectar. The manipulation of mechanisms that control various crop plant traits for the benefit of pollinators has been suggested in the bid to increase food security, but little is known about inherent floral trait expression in contemporary OSR varieties or the breeding systems used in OSR breeding programmes.

Re-evaluating strategies for pollinator-dependent crops: How useful is parthenocarpy?

Whilst most studies reviewing the reliance of global agriculture on insect pollination advocate increasing the 'supply' of pollinators (wild or managed) to improve crop yields, there has been little focus on altering a crop's 'demand' for pollinators.Parthenocarpy (fruit set in the absence of fertilization) is a trait which can increase fruit quantity and quality from pollinator-dependent crops by removing the need for pollination.Here we present a meta-analysis of studies examining the extent and effectiveness of parthenocarpy-promoting techniques (genetic modification, hormone application and selective breeding) currently being used commercially, or experimentally, on pollinator-dependent crops in different test environments (no pollination, hand pollination, open pollination).

Modeling Effects of Honeybee Behaviors on the Distribution of Pesticide in Nectar within a Hive and Resultant in-Hive Exposure.

Recently, the causes of honeybee colony losses have been intensely studied, showing that there are multiple stressors implicated in colony declines, one stressor being the exposure to pesticides. Measuring exposure of individual bees within a hive to pesticide is at least as difficult as assessing the potential exposure of foraging bees to pesticide. We present a model to explore how heterogeneity of pesticide distribution on a comb in the hive can be driven by worker behaviors.

Migratory flight behaviour of the pollen beetle Meligethes aeneus.

Background: The field ecology of the pollen beetle Meligethes aeneus and its damaging effects on oilseed rape crops are well understood. However, the flight behaviour of M. aeneus, in particular the drivers for migratory movements across the landscape, is not well studied.

Optimal search patterns in honeybee orientation flights are robust against emerging infectious diseases.

Lévy flights are scale-free (fractal) search patterns found in a wide range of animals. They can be an advantageous strategy promoting high encounter rates with rare cues that may indicate prey items, mating partners or navigational landmarks. The robustness of this behavioural strategy to ubiquitous threats to animal performance, such as pathogens, remains poorly understood.

Flight performance of actively foraging honey bees is reduced by a common pathogen.

Sudden and severe declines in honey bee (Apis mellifera) colony health in the US and Europe have been attributed, in part, to emergent microbial pathogens, however, the mechanisms behind the impact are unclear. Using roundabout flight mills, we measured the flight distance and duration of actively foraging, healthy-looking honey bees sampled from standard colonies, before quantifying the level of infection by Nosema ceranae and Deformed Wing Virus complex (DWV) for each bee. Neither the presence nor the quantity of N.

Predicting Honeybee Colony Failure: Using the BEEHAVE Model to Simulate Colony Responses to Pesticides.

To simulate effects of pesticides on different honeybee (Apis mellifera L.) life stages, we used the BEEHAVE model to explore how increased mortalities of larvae, in-hive workers, and foragers, as well as reduced egg-laying rate, could impact colony dynamics over multiple years. Stresses were applied for 30 days, both as multiples of the modeled control mortality and as set percentage daily mortalities to assess the sensitivity of the modeled colony both to small fluctuations in mortality and periods of low to very high daily mortality.

BEEHAVE: a systems model of honeybee colony dynamics and foraging to explore multifactorial causes of colony failure.

A notable increase in failure of managed European honeybee L. colonies has been reported in various regions in recent years. Although the underlying causes remain unclear, it is likely that a combination of stressors act together, particularly varroa mites and other pathogens, forage availability and potentially pesticides.

So near and yet so far: harmonic radar reveals reduced homing ability of Nosema infected honeybees.

Pathogens may gain a fitness advantage through manipulation of the behaviour of their hosts. Likewise, host behavioural changes can be a defence mechanism, counteracting the impact of pathogens on host fitness. We apply harmonic radar technology to characterize the impact of an emerging pathogen--Nosema ceranae (Microsporidia)--on honeybee (Apis mellifera) flight and orientation performance in the field.

The ontogeny of bumblebee flight trajectories: from naïve explorers to experienced foragers.

Understanding strategies used by animals to explore their landscape is essential to predict how they exploit patchy resources, and consequently how they are likely to respond to changes in resource distribution. Social bees provide a good model for this and, whilst there are published descriptions of their behaviour on initial learning flights close to the colony, it is still unclear how bees find floral resources over hundreds of metres and how these flights become directed foraging trips. We investigated the spatial ecology of exploration by radar tracking bumblebees, and comparing the flight trajectories of bees with differing experience.

Towards a systems approach for understanding honeybee decline: a stocktaking and synthesis of existing models.

The health of managed and wild honeybee colonies appears to have declined substantially in Europe and the United States over the last decade. Sustainability of honeybee colonies is important not only for honey production, but also for pollination of crops and wild plants alongside other insect pollinators. A combination of causal factors, including parasites, pathogens, land use changes and pesticide usage, are cited as responsible for the increased colony mortality.

A strong immune response in young adult honeybees masks their increased susceptibility to infection compared to older bees.

Honeybees, Apis mellifera, show age-related division of labor in which young adults perform maintenance ("housekeeping") tasks inside the colony before switching to outside foraging at approximately 23 days old. Disease resistance is an important feature of honeybee biology, but little is known about the interaction of pathogens and age-related division of labor. We tested a hypothesis that older forager bees and younger "house" bees differ in susceptibility to infection.