Honeybee health: from landscapes to behaviour

Crop production in the Asian tropics depends critically on pollination services provided by bees. Yet very little is still known about their behaviour, ecology and health. This interdisciplinary project will generate a knowledge base that incorporates the main factors determining the capacity of pollinators - activity, nutrition and health. This project offers the opportunity to address the lack of baseline data for pollination by managed bees in the Indian tropics, which is a major obstacle to understanding the food-security risks posed by the loss of bee pollinators and developing effective measures to augment efficiency and resilience of food production. Using a range of behavioural and molecular-biological methods, this project will investigate the foraging behaviour and disease biology of the Eastern and Western honeybees, in close collaboration with our research partners in Kerala, South India.