Location: Pollinator Health in Southern Crop Ecosystems Research
Project Number: 6066-30500-004-015-S
Project Type: Non-Assistance Cooperative Agreement
Start Date: Sep 30, 2025
End Date: Sep 28, 2027
Objective:
Develop collaborative research efforts to better understand honey bee colony health- Honey bee colony losses continue to remain high in the United States. The upper Midwest region comprising of North Dakota, Montana and South Dakota are critical summer foraging areas for honey bee colonies. Beekeepers from across the US regularly move colonies to these regions and colonies will build up on the forage available in these regions between June and August prior to making their way back to California by the end of the year for the next season’s almond pollination.
Sunflowers are one of the major summer flowering crops in this region and more recently, beekeepers have reported suffering substantial colony loss on colonies when placed near sunflower fields. Sunflowers have always constituted a quality nectar and pollen source, and there has been little to no understanding as to what could be causing these colony losses.
The research objectives for this project are:
1. To understand the colony level effects of placing honey bee colonies near sunflower fields in the Upper Midwest
2. To assess the pesticide impacts on honey bees when placed near sunflower fields
3. To evaluate the nutrition for foraging honey bees near sunflowers.
Approach:
The proposed work would take place in North Dakota in partnership with commercial beekeepers that bring their hives to the region for summer foraging. Individual beekeepers and sunflower growers will be identified and a total of 6 apiaries will be monitored with three apiaries next to sunflower fields and three apiaries in the same region without a sunflower field within a five-mile radius. Colonies will be monitored for a variety of colony strength metrics and samples will be collected, throughout the year. Colonies will be managed typically by the beekeeper, and researchers will coordinate with the sunflower grower to understand pesticide application details and schedules.
Colonies will be monitored before, during, and after the sunflower bloom in both regions. Colonies will be assessed for colony strength metrics such as frames of adult honey bees, frames of capped honey bee worker brood, Varroa mite infestation, and a sample of adult honey bees will be collected to look at virus titers in adult honey bees. During these assessments, colonies will also have bee bread and nectar samples collected. Additionally, five colonies per apiary will have pollen traps fitted to them where traps will be opened and pollen will be collected during assessment times. Lastly, researchers will also collect pollen and nectar directly from the sunflowers in the field.
Upon completion of collection, samples will be shipped for various testing. A subset of bee bread, pollen, and nectar samples will be sent to Cornell University for pesticide residue testing. Samples of the same type will also be shipped to the Stoneville Lab where they will be analyzed for nutritional content and presence of heavy metals. Meanwhile, adult honey bee samples will be sent to the National Agriculture Genotyping Center where they will be analyzed for presence of common honey bee viruses like deformed wing virus A and B as well as acute bee paralysis virus. These results will be paired with colony level data and compared to colonies note.
Results from this work will be presented to beekeepers at various conferences, and they will be published open access in a scientific, peer-reviewed journal.