Changes in honey bee populations

For thousands of years, honey bees, one of the most industrious creatures on earth, have benefited plants, the environment, and humans by carrying pollen from one flower to another.

Pollinators and pollination, represented by honeybees, are a fundamental survival process in our ecosystem, and nearly 90% of the world's flowering plant species depend entirely or to some extent on pollination by pollinators. Bees contribute to human food security and nutrition by maintaining natural ecosystems while helping humans produce large quantities of fruits, nuts, and seeds, and by increasing the diversity and quality of agricultural products. But honey bees are facing multiple threats to their survival. According to the Verge, several studies have shown that honey bee populations around the world have declined in recent years and are even at the risk of extinction, making the decline a global problem.

I．CCD Introduction

CCD is one of the manifestations of CCD. The most important feature of CCD is that worker bees disappear and no bodies can be found. Instead, the larvae, queen, and food are present in the hive. Bees are collecting pollen because the bees will be diligent in spreading pollen every day, the United Kingdom alone, there is 120 million to 200 million worth of crops and grasses are dependent on bees to spread pollen to reproduce the next generation, so when a large number of bees disappeared, crops and grasses will lose the way to spread pollen, in the long run, crops and grasses will not be able to grow, forage for food livestock will be extinct, crops will also The result will be a massive food shortage.

There are many possible causes of CCD, such as malnutrition theory, antibiotics and acaricides, and bee management, but there is still no accurate answer.

 

II．Module Evaluation

We built our simple model to simulate the change in the bee population. Since honey bees are metamorphic in development and have a strong division of labor, we analyzed each of the four life cycles of honey bees: eggs and larvae, pupae, nurturing bees, and foraging bees.

 

In the first model, we considered the variation in the number of the four cycles and we integrated the differences in mortality rate under different seasons, egg laying rate, mortality rate under different age stages of rearing bees, the effect of food acquisition on mortality rate and the conversion rate of bees between different life cycles to obtain the following graphs:

 

In the figure, B represents the number of larvae and eggs, Y represents the number of pupae, H represents nurturing bees, F represents foragers, and ALL represents the total number of bee colonies.

For the second model, we used fractional derivatives to represent the variation in the number of bees, again taking a four-stage approach, and obtained the following graphs:

 

By substituting the parameters obtained by consulting the statistical data, we found that the total number of final colonies fluctuates between 10,000 and 80,000, which matches the actual situation, while the percentage of rearing bees reaches more than 80%, and the number of each life cycle effectively reflects the change with seasonal fluctuations. By changing the parameters to modify the mortality and conversion rates, our model is also extensible for different bee colonies.

However, due to the lack of data on honey bee sampling, there is still room for improvement in the model correction, and the lack of consideration of fertilization and Unfertilized rates, as well as the effect of the latter cycle on the change in the number of the previous cycle, have not been explored in depth, but simply generalized by the conversion factor is a shortcoming in our model.

III.Module Exemplification

To reveal the practicality of the model, we assume a square field that is three times as long as it is wide (in line with the ratio of realistic general land) and that the field is flat and uniformly planted with canola. The general spacing of canola flowers is 10 cm a plant, so there are about 100 canola flowers per square meter of land.

 

We assume that the number of foraging bees, which mainly perform the pollination function in bees, is F(t), and one foraging bee can pollinate p plants a day, then for a plant with a spacing of x meters and a coverage area of x2, the effective coverage area of a hive is：

Sp= F(t)*p*a* x2

where a is a correction factor, and the actual pollination efficiency of bees in a colony will be reduced because in practice there may be multiple bees collecting the same plant in a day.

Also, assuming that Sp is a circle with the beehive as the center, then it is given by

Sp= pi*r2

So the model is simplified to how to spread as many circles as possible on a rectangle.

Since the flowering period is usually three to five days, we assume that a coverage area of eighty percent or more is achieved.

 

A simple way to implement this is to use the greedy algorithm, but of course, we can also use the ABC algorithm to further optimize the results.