Professor University of Wisconsin Madison, Wisconsin
Honey bees provide pollination services to crops around the world. But these crops do not always provide adequate nutrition for the bees and can expose the bees to pesticides. As a result, beekeepers are hesitant to bring their hives to crops where they believe the hives will come out weaker than when they entered. It’s possible, however, that placing hives into diverse landscapes after pollinating a crop may provide a rescue effect, making up for the detrimental effect of the crop. In this study, we monitored commercial honey bee hives that pollinated cranberry and hives that did not pollinate cranberry. Hives in each group were placed at bee yards that covered a gradient from low to high natural habitat in the surrounding landscape. We found that hives that visited cranberry were, on average, less productive than hives that did not visit cranberry. Patterns of weight gain in hives that visited cranberry was not influenced by the surrounding landscape. We will complete the second field season of this project in 2022 and will be eager to share our results in November.
