Publications by authors named "Robert J Paxton"

Many invertebrates exhibit parental care, posited as a precursor to sociality. For example, solitary foundresses of the facultative social orchid bee guard their brood for 6+ weeks before offspring emerge, when the nest may become social. Guarding comes at the fitness cost of foregoing the production of additional offspring.

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Bees are crucial for food security and biodiversity. However, managed bees are increasingly considered drivers of wild bee declines, leading to stakeholder conflicts and restrictive policies. We propose avenues to reconcile wild and managed bee proponents and point out knowledge gaps that hinder the development of evidence-based policies.

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Emerging infectious diseases pose a threat to pollinators. Virus transmission among pollinators via flowers may be reinforced by anthropogenic land-use change and concomitant alteration of plant-pollinator interactions. Here, we examine how species' traits and roles in flower-visitation networks and landscape-scale factors drive key honeybee viruses-black queen cell virus (BQCV) and deformed wing virus-in 19 wild bee and hoverfly species, across 12 landscapes varying in pollinator-friendly (flower-rich) habitat.

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Implementation of marker-assisted selection (MAS) in modern beekeeping would improve sustainability, especially in breeding programs aiming for resilience against the parasitic mite . Selecting honey bee colonies for natural resistance traits, such as brood-intrinsic suppression of varroa mite reproduction, reduces the use of chemical acaricides while respecting local adaptation. In 2019, eight genomic variants associated with varroa non-reproduction in drone brood were discovered in a single colony from the Amsterdam Water Dune population in the Netherlands.

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The transmission of pathogens from reservoir to recipient host species, termed pathogen spillover, can profoundly impact plant, animal, and public health. However, why some pathogens lead to disease emergence in a novel species while others fail to establish or do not elicit disease is often poorly understood. There is strong evidence that deformed wing virus (DWV), an (+)ssRNA virus, spills over from its reservoir host, the honeybee , into the bumblebee .

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Wild bees are crucial pollinators of flowering plants and concerns are rising about their decline associated with pesticide use. Interspecific variation in wild bee response to pesticide exposure is expected to be related to variation in their morphology, physiology, and ecology, though there are still important knowledge gaps in its understanding. Pesticide risk assessments have largely focussed on the Western honey bee sensitivity considering it protective enough for wild bees.

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Article Synopsis
  • Honey bee colonies are vital for society and the economy, but beekeepers face challenges like parasites, reduced pollen, and pesticide exposure, necessitating a better understanding of colony health.
  • To address these issues, the B-GOOD project was created to develop a Health Status Index (HSI) for bee colonies by collecting and analyzing various data points related to colony health and environmental conditions.
  • This project emphasizes the importance of standardized data collection and machine learning to provide beekeepers with targeted guidance and contribute to sustainable beekeeping practices.
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Invasive vectors can induce dramatic changes in disease epidemiology. While viral emergence following geographical range expansion of a vector is well known, the influence a vector can have at the level of the host's pathobiome is less well understood. Taking advantage of the formerly heterogeneous spatial distribution of the ectoparasitic mite that acts as potent virus vector among honeybees , we investigated the impact of its recent global spread on the viral community of honeybees in a retrospective study of historical samples.

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Mason bees ( spp.) are efficient fruit tree pollinators that can be encouraged to occupy and breed in artificial nesting material. In sweet cherry orchards, they are occasionally used as an alternative managed pollinator as a replacement for or in addition to honey bees ().

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Background: Over the last two decades, honey bees () have suffered high rates of colony losses that have been attributed to a variety of factors, chief among which are viral pathogens, such as deformed wing virus (DWV), whose virulence has increased because of vector-based transmission by the invasive, ectoparasitic varroa mite (). A shift in the experimental mode of transmission of the black queen cell virus (BQCV) and sacbrood virus (SBV) from fecal/food-oral (direct horizontal) to vector-mediated (indirect horizontal) transmission also results in high virulence and viral titers in pupal and adult honey bees. Agricultural pesticides represent another factor that acts independently or in interaction with pathogens, and they are also thought to cause colony loss.

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Widespread native honey bee species in South and East Asia (Apis cerana, Apis dorsata and Apis florea) and the imported western honey bee (Apis mellifera) share habitats and potentially also share pathogens. Chief among the threats facing A. mellifera in Europe and North America is deformed wing virus (DWV), including its two principal genotypes: A and B (DWV-A and DWV-B respectively).

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Sweat bees have repeatedly gained and lost eusociality, a transition from individual to group reproduction. Here we generate chromosome-length genome assemblies for 17 species and identify genomic signatures of evolutionary trade-offs associated with transitions between social and solitary living. Both young genes and regulatory regions show enrichment for these molecular patterns.

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  • * A study examined the toxicity of polystyrene (PS)-MP fragments on honey bees by exposing them to different sizes and concentrations of MPs over 14 days.
  • * Results showed no significant impact on bee survival, but there was a decrease in feeding rate and body weight, especially at a specific concentration, indicating potential long-term health effects for honey bees.
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Honey bees are essential for crop and wild plant pollination. However, many countries have reported high annual colony losses caused by multiple possible stressors. Diseases, particularly those caused by viruses, are a major cause of colony losses.

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Article Synopsis
  • Wild pollinators are crucial for global food production, but their impacts are not included in the widely used Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) method due to limited data and compatibility issues.
  • This study used a Delphi assessment with 25 experts to estimate pollinator abundance across 24 land use categories, resulting in globally generic characterization factors (CFs) to evaluate land use impacts on wild pollinators.
  • The proposed CFs help differentiate the effects of various land uses on pollinator abundance, serving as a foundational step to better integrate pollinator impacts into LCA studies and illustrating the effectiveness of expert-driven approaches to address data gaps.
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is a microsporidian that infects species. Recently, natural compounds have been proposed to control nosemosis and reduce its transmission among honey bees. We investigated how ethanolic extract of 's propolis and chito-oligosaccharide (COS) impact the health of -infected workers.

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Stingless bees are ecologically and economically important species in the tropics and subtropics, but there has been little research on the characterization of detoxification systems and immune responses within them. This is critical for understanding their responses to, and defenses against, a variety of environmental stresses, including agrochemicals. Therefore, we studied the detoxification and immune responses of a stingless bee, , which is an important stingless bee that is widely distributed throughout Mexico, including urban areas, and has the potential to be used in commercial pollination.

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There is growing evidence that pesticides may be among the causes of worldwide bee declines, which has resulted in repeated calls for their increased scrutiny in regulatory assessments. One recurring concern is that the current frameworks may be biased towards assessing risks to the honey bee. This paradigm requires extrapolating toxicity information across bee species.

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Urbanization is a global phenomenon that can affect fitness and could challenge the persistence of most species, including wild bee pollinators. Yet, how and which environmental features affect bee health and fitness within the urban ecosystem remain unclear. Here, we placed experimental Bombus terrestris colonies in sites spanning from the edge into a city's core to investigate bumble bee parasitism, foraging behaviour, energetic stress, colony growth and reproductive output.

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The gut microbiome plays an important role in bee health and disease. But it can be disrupted by pesticides and in-hive chemicals, putting honey bee health in danger. We used a controlled and fully crossed laboratory experimental design to test the effects of a 10-day period of chronic exposure to field-realistic sublethal concentrations of two nicotinic acetylcholine receptor agonist insecticides (nACHRs), namely flupyradifurone (FPF) and sulfoxaflor (Sulf), and a fungicide, azoxystrobin (Azoxy), individually and in combination, on the survival of individual honey bee workers and the composition of their gut microbiota (fungal and bacterial diversity).

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To accommodate an ever-increasing human population, agriculture is rapidly intensifying at the expense of natural habitat, with negative and widely reported effects on biodiversity in general and on wild bee abundance and diversity in particular. Cities are similarly increasing in area, though the impact of urbanisation on wild bees is more equivocal and potentially positive in northern temperate regions. Yet agriculture and urbanisation both lead to the loss and alteration of natural habitat, its fragmentation, a potential reduction in floral availability, and warmer temperatures, factors thought to be drivers of wild bee decline.

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The western honey bee () is of major economic and ecological importance, with elevated rates of colony losses in temperate regions over the last two decades thought to be largely caused by the exotic ectoparasitic mite and deformed wing virus (DWV), which the mite transmits. DWV currently exists as two main genotypes: the formerly widespread DWV-A and the more recently described and rapidly expanding DWV-B. It is an excellent system to understand viral evolution and the replacement of one viral variant by another.

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Stingless bees are the largest group of eusocial pollinators with diverse natural histories, including obligate cleptobionts (genus Lestrimelitta) that completely abandoned flower visitation to rely on other stingless bees for food and nest materials. Species of Lestrimeliita are thought to specialize upon different host species, and deception through chemical similarity has been proposed as a mechanism to explain this phenomenon. In the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico, Scaptotrigona pectoralis is a species chemically distinct from, and not preferred as a host by, locally widespread Lestrimeliita niitkib; witnessing attacks on S.

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