Towards the development of an index for the holistic assessment of the health status of a honey bee colony

Honey bees play an important role in the maintenance of both, biodiversity and food security through pollination services and also represent an important source of income for rural areas. Despite several studies and monitoring projects gathering a large amount of data on the main factors/stressors influencing honey bee colonies, there is a lack of holistic and multidimensional statistical tools integrating different aspects which define honey bee colony health. Such tools are important to support the sustainable management of honey bees. In this study, we designed and tested a methodological framework based on Structural Equation Models for the development of a honey bee Health Status Index. The index accounts for the main abiotic (e.g. pesticide contamination, landscape characteristics) and biotic (e.g. parasitosis, virosis) factors influencing honey bee health, including the beekeepers role in managing the colony. The proposed methodology was validated against a dataset representing seven scenarios generated through Expert Knowledge Elicitation. The validation procedure showed that the Health Status Index integrates different sources of data and it can quantify the health status of a honey bee colony based on the characteristics of each scenario. Furthermore, it allows the investigation of the influence of different drivers/stressors on the health of the honey bee colony. The Health Status Index provides flexibility in the selection of variables, making it a valuable tool for holistic and harmonised assessment of honey bee health. Once validated, the index can support the evaluation at different spatial (from local- to area-wide management) and temporal (medium- to long-term management) scales to support stakeholders’ (e.g. beekeepers, risk assessors, risk managers) decision-making.