A new thesis just out emphasizes:

> A key insight obtained from the study of the Arnot forest bees is that environmental differences between wild nests and managed hives at apiaries play a critical role in wild population persistence (Seeley, 2019). It is the peculiarities of their living conditions, including small and widely spaced nests, and their behavioural consequences, like frequent swarming, that allow wild-living colonies to survive on the population level without the need for costly behavioural defences (Seeley & Smith, 2015; Loftus, Smith & Seeley, 2016; Seeley, 2017).

In other words, instead of feral bees being genetically distinct and having better survival traits, their survival is due to environmental factors as outlined above. The key take home message is that keeping large colonies in apiaries has problems of course, but the alternative: keeping little colonies up in trees widely spaced, is not really an option for beekeeping. Further:

> All colonies in a region belong to one biological population due to genetic exchange through the random mating of queens and drones. Colonies can migrate between the cohorts of managed colonies and wild-living colonies.

> While 90% of feral colonies survived the summer (July–September; N = 100 observations), only 16% survived the winter. The annual survival rate of feral colonies resulting from the product of summer, winter and spring survival rates is 𝑠 = 0.106 or 10.6%. Consequently, each colony would need to produce an average of 𝐷 = 8.43 swarms annually to maintain the population. This clearly exceeds the assumed natality rate of 𝑛 = two swarms produced per colony per year. Accordingly, the net reproductive rate of the feral honeybee population is 𝑅 0 = 0.318, indicating that it is currently not self-sustaining. The estimated average lifespan of feral colonies in German forests is 0.619 years.

PLB

PL Kohl - 2023. The buzz beyond the beehive: population demography, parasite burden and limiting factors of wild-living honeybee colonies in Germany

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