Honey bees (Apis mellifera) are exposed to multiple stressors such as pesticides, forage gaps, diseases, land use change and management failures. It is therefore a long-standing aim to develop a robust understanding how stressors impact honey bee vitality. Especially the role of landscape structure and amount of mass flowering crop in the landscape on bee vitality is discussed in the literature. However, experimental and monitoring studies are limited in their ability to assess these relationships between stressors and honey bee vitality systematically. Therefore, we use the established honey bee simulation model BEEHAVE in combination with land use classification maps to contribute to the assessment of honey bee vitality in Germany. This work is one use case of the BioDT project to develop digital Twins for biodiversity. In this presentation we will focus on the effect of landscape structure on relevant end points such as winter mortality and honey production. Our results are in line with previous findings that temporal foraging gaps are severe threads to honey bees and that landscape elements (e.g. semi natural grasslands) that provide resources in absence of mass flowering crops (e.g. oilseed rape) are essential for honey bee population performance. This study is an important step towards a model-based, automatic, easy and free to apply Germany-wide assessment of honey bee vitality for agricultural landscapes.

The poster was first presented at the Annual Meeting of the GfÖ 2023 12-16 September in Leipzig, Germany.