Food security For Honey Bees

摘要

[The Editor would like to thank the Editor of Bee Culture and Jay Evans for their kind permission to republish this article which appeared first in Bee Culture, February 2021.]Honey bees provide humans with food security, but what does it take to ensure nutritious and safe food for their own livelihoods? Bee fans from an early age know honey bees and other pollinators require pollen and nectar from flowering plants. From thereit is intuitive that theabundance and nutritional quality of both will translate into better colony growth and reproduction. What is still debated is how to achieve quality and quantity at the landscape level, given competing bees and competing interests. One long-running effort to address this debate at a practical level has been made by U.S. government and University scientists working with land managers and beekeepers in the Northern Great Plains region of the U.S. This region in the eastern halves of North and South Dakotaand extending East and South into Minnesota and Iowa, includes vital bee grounds for a third of U.S. honey bee colonies. Historically a region of high honey yields and numerous commercial beeyards, the NGP has shifted towards managed crop agriculture inrecent decades. Dr. Clint Otto and colleagues at the U.S. Geological Service, with others from USDA and nearby Universities, have recently summarized 10 years of research aimed at understanding how forage availability impacts bee health in the short andlonger terms. The results have practical importance for land management but also indicate what drives honey bee growth and survival and how to measure both. Their compilation, "Forage and habitat for pollinators in the northern Great Plains - Implications for U.S. Department of Agriculture conservation programs" (U.S. Geological Survey Open-File Report 2020-1037, 64 p., https:// doi.org/ 10.3133/ ofr20201037) is freely available and clearly written.