# Urbanization Increases Pathogen Pressure on Feral and Managed Honey Bees



## FlowerPlanter (Aug 3, 2011)

Heard that before;

"If you have ferial bees that don't need treatments to survive then it is fine and you are indeed helping the bees. 

If you buy bees that require treatment to survive you will be displacing any ferial bees, introducing bad genes into your local area that will spread through drones and swarms, bringing in diseases that are only suppressed by the antibiotics that all commercial bees are given, plus introducing bees that can't survive mites. 

That's why many people can't do TF. "


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## Phoebee (Jan 29, 2014)

That's an interesting study but we would do well to note that it does not actually reach the conclusion that urbanization favors disease, rather that they want to do more study, having found some measures suggesting "pressure". I've seen other indications that urban or suburban bees may actually do better than commercial bees. One factor cited is that some urban areas actually have very good forage available, and may have lower pesticide use than some agricultural areas. Let's face it, an apiary surrounded by a million acres of nothing but corn might as well be in a desert.

Have comparable studies been done on disease pressures due to apiary size? I suspect there are some data out there on adverse effects of migratory beekeeping.

It is unlikely that urban bees are kept in large apiaries, and highly unlikely that they migrate to the almond groves. However, the popularity of beekeeping in some cities is growing, and opportunities exist for bees from many small apiaries to mingle on forage. The large city that comes to mind where one might do a good study is Washington DC. USDA has hives there, the White House has a couple, there's a hive in the Museum of Natural History (grossly badly managed when I saw it a few weeks back), and I've seen them at local universities. I would expect that the National Arboretum has them as well. The city has a large number of heavily managed floral sources.

This would make DC a good place to do a study, as they have "official" hives managed by qualified people (mostly), with the Beltsville Bee Lab a short drive outside of town.

But any study should include a comparison to other environments, including areas of intense agricultural apiculture, migratory stresses, compared to relatively isolated and small apiaries (on islands or non-migratory in areas with low apiary density). Local effects should be considered. Crop type? Pesticide use? Presence of good bee clubs offering education and resources? Weather stresses?

We know bees face stress. Urban bees included.


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## Phoebee (Jan 29, 2014)

Reading in detail, I think it is pretty clear that injecting bees with paraquat is a really, really bad idea. (Figure 4 in the study, and accompanying text.) I'm not clear as to what this test proved apart from that. It was bad for city bees and bad for country bees. I never had any urge to do this and I certainly won't be starting.

When designing a test, first decide what you will do if the results of the test are positive. Then decide what you will do if the results of the test are negative. If the two answers are the same, don't bother doing the test.

And in this case, where both results are negative and that's to be expected, let's move on to a test that is likely to produce a difference.


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