Honey bees as bioindicators of changing global agricultural landscapes

Abstract

There is a growing need to understand relationships between agricultural intensification and global change. Monitoring solutions, however, often do not include pollinator communities that are of importance to ecosystem integrity. Here, we put forth the honey bee as an economical and broadly available bioindicator that can be used to assess and track changes in the quality of agricultural ecosystems. We detail a variety of simple, low-cost procedures that can be deployed within honey bee hives to gain generalizable information about ecosystem quality at multiple scales, and discuss the potential of the honey bee system in both environmental and ecological bioindication.