Temperature as an early warning signal of honeybee colony failure

Authors: COLIN, T - University Of Sydney; DAKOS, V - Pierre And Marie Curie University; BARRON, A - Macquarie University; Meikle, William; ALTMANN, E - University Of Sydney; LATTY, T - University Of Sydney

Submitted to: Ecological Informatics
Publication Type: Peer Reviewed Journal
Publication Acceptance Date: 9/24/2025
Publication Date: 9/26/2025
Citation: Colin, T., Dakos, V., Barron, A.B., Meikle, W.G., Altmann, E., Latty, T. 2025. Temperature as an early warning signal of honeybee colony failure. Ecological Informatics. 92: Article 103445. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecoinf.2025.103445.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecoinf.2025.103445

Interpretive Summary: Honey bee colonies are complex systems. Honey bees try to maintain certain conditions, such as a certain temperature regime, in the hive in order to raise brood, fight diseases and pests, among other things. Honey bee colonies also fail from time to time, often for unknown reasons, and colony failure may or may not be preceded by symptoms that are typically visible to a beekeeper. The question here is whether, by continuously monitoring temperature, we can detect impending colony failure, even if there are no other obvious signs of problems. Three independent datasets of colony survivorship coupled with continuous datasets of colony temperature. We found that there are markers in the temperature data that can be used to forecast the chances of colony failure with a reasonably high rate of success. This may be useful to beekeepers, especially since hive monitoring technology is becoming widely available.

Technical Abstract: How to identify ecological systems at risk of failure is a central question of modern biology and agriculture. Due to human impacts and global change there is a growing need for early warning signals that identify when an ecological system is at risk of a state change before those changes become irreversible or extremely complex and costly to remediate. Honey bees (Apis mellifera) are an urgent case because our food crops heavily rely on them for pollination and annual bee colony losses reported by beekeepers across the globe are unsustainable. Given enough warning, beekeepers can rescue dying colonies, but early warning signals of death for individual bee colonies are lacking. Here we used early warning theory to investigate whether internal hive temperature can be used as an early indicator of impending colony failure. Across three distinct datasets we found that temperature regulation of failing colonies was different enough to distinguish them from healthy colonies weeks before they died. This signal would be early enough to intervene and assist colonies with standard beekeeping practices. Our study shows that early warning theory can help to identify practical signals of risk of state change even in systems that change state relatively rapidly, such as a bee hive.