Location: Pollinator Health in Southern Crop Ecosystems Research
Project Number: 6066-30500-004-019-S
Project Type: Non-Assistance Cooperative Agreement
Start Date: Aug 3, 2026
End Date: Aug 2, 2028
Objective:
1. Evaluate how hive pesticide exposure to hives may vary across time and space
2. Develop indices of common beekeeping practices and evaluate their associations with pesticide exposure and resistance to the common miticide, Amitraz used to control varroa mites
Approach:
This Agreement will support research in line with the Secretary's priorities, ensuring profitability to American beekeepers and farmers, promoting honey bee health through regenarative longterm productivity for beekeepers and ensuring access to safe, healthy and nutritious food for all Americans.
This further supports the sustained success of the Rapid Agriculture Crisis Response (RACR-Bee) launched by ARS to address widespread bee losses in 2025, and aims to build long term resilience in honey bee health.
This agreement will support research projects that aim to evaluate how hive pesticide exposure varies across time and space. Experimental colonies will be assessed for a variety of colony strength metrics such as frames of adult honey bees, frames of capped honey bee worker brood and Varroa destructor infestation. Colony management practices for individual beekeepers will also be recorded. The data will be used to develop indexes of common beekeeping practices and their associations with pesticide exposure and mite control methods, to explain factors affecting colony health, mite resistance to miticides and overall pollination efficiency.
The findings will have positive cascading effects for the American beekeeping industry and will enable strategies that strengthen the pollination services beekeepers can provide. The impact of this study will be regional and national including data from several commercial beekeepers spread across the US.
The results of the various research components will be made available through publications in refereed journals, trade magazines, or extension articles. The findings will be shared with beekeepers and growers via presentations at professional and stakeholder meetings. Information from the research findings will be integrated and formulated into improved colony management strategies.