A multi-scale model of disease transfer in honey bee colonies

Abstract

Inter-colony disease transfer poses a serious hurdle to successfully managing healthy honeybee colonies. In this study, we build a multi-scale model of two interacting honey bee colonies. The model considers the effects of forager and drone drift, guarding behaviour, and resource robbing of dying colonies on the spread of disease between colonies. Our results show that when drifting is high, disease can spread rapidly between colonies, that guarding behaviour needs to be particularly efficient to be effective, and that for dense apiaries drifting is of greater concern than robbing. We show that while disease can put an individual colony at greater risk, drifting can help less the burden of disease in a colony. We posit some evolutionary questions that come from this study that can be addressed with this model.