A Hive Mind: Bounded Rationality and Bees

Abstract

Bees (Anthophila) are experiencing global decline as part of what is being called the Anthropocene extinction. In addition to the drivers of this event, such as climate change, bees are experiencing synergistic challenges from pesticides, poor nutrition, pathogens, and parasites. Bees play a crucial role in our world because they help to pollinate flowers, allowing plants in both agricultural and ecological settings to reproduce, and our reliance on them is projected to increase, even as their numbers decline. Therefore, there is a critical need to identify and understand how the behavior of bees, and human behavior towards bees, function under settings of imperfect information, where we act as boundedly rational actors. Therefore, in our studies, we focus on the impacts of changing landscapes on bees – whether those are environmental or political. In our investigations, we utilized bees, measuring their behaviors and community health, in multiple contexts to evaluate the interface of the human - bee world. In Chapter 2, we investigated the impact of human land use changes on honey bee foraging dynamics. We decoded, mapped, and analyzed the waggle dances of hives in Blacksburg, Virginia before (2018-19) and after (2022) the conversion of some of their prime habitat through construction. We found that bees increased their foraging nearly four-fold on the microhabitat which were untouched by the construction, but they are forced to nearly double their average foraging distance (0.69 to 1.28km) after the land development. In Chapter 3, we deployed dancing honey bees as potential predictors for native bee abundance and diversity. We used an existing dataset of decoded honey bee waggle dances (n = 11,050 from 2018-2019) to map three Virginian locations (Blacksburg, Winchester, and Suffolk) and the places preferred and avoided by bees within. Then we sampled (2021-2022) at 10 sites within each location using hand nets, bee bowls, and blue vane traps to determine the relationship between honey bee predicted landscapes and native bee abundance and diversity. We found a parabolic relationship between honey bee foraging and native bee abundance (p < 0.001), a relationship that remains robust when we stratify our capture by family (Apidae and non-Apidae) or sociality (solitary and social). In Chapter 4, we quantified bee community health metrics (abundance, richness, and diversity) in soybean plots in Columbia, Missouri, which were either treated with grower standard pyrethroid spray or attract-and-kill insecticidal netting treatments for the control of Japanese Beetle. These bee community health metrics were based on 1473 captured bees. We found a significant decrease in bee abundance in attract-and kill-plots compared to grower standard plots for all application periods (p < 0.002), a trend driven solely by the most common species, Melissodes bimaculatus. In Chapter 5, we directly examined human behavior concerning bees by analyzing the location, policy subsystem, and partisan control in which recent state level bee statutes were passed in the United States, following the 2022 midterm elections. We report on a robustly significant relationship between partisan control over states and the category of bee legislation enacted (p = 0.004). Our spatial analysis revealed a contiguous bloc of central states, along the Mississippi-Missouri Rivers, which did not enact bee legislation. We speculate this may be because soybean, a self-pollinating crop, is one of their largest agricultural exports. Finally, we conclude this thesis with a brief discussion of how these chapters have advanced our understanding of how bees react to human modified landscapes, and how human assumptions about bees shape our behaviors, from the level of individual farms to entire regions of the country.