Floral diversity enhances winter survival of honey bee colonies across climatic regions

In temperate climates, winter can be an arduous time for eusocial insects. Survival of honey bee colonies during winter depends on a delicate balance between hive thermoregulation, managing the food reserves, and timing the onset of the new worker bee generation. Winter survival is influenced by several factors, most notably colony size, Varroa mites infestation levels and the availability of stored food. Importantly, the climatic conditions and floral resources of the previous foraging season can also impact honey bee health and colony strength before hibernation. This study, conducted across Europe, examines how landscape composition and weather conditions affect winter survival of honey bee colonies. It uses pollen diversity as a proxy for flower resource quality and available foraging days as a climatic variable to understand their causal relationships to winter survival. We found that landscapes with higher percentages of agricultural areas increased pollen diversity collected by h..., The study quantified landscape composition around apiaries using QGIS with a 2-km buffer and land use data from the CORINE 2018 Land Cover map (European Environment Agency and European Environment Agency 2019), classifying habitats into four categories. Pollen diversity, used as a proxy for floral resource diversity, was assessed through monthly pollen collection from March to November 2022 using pollen traps, followed by DNA metabarcoding for species identification (Sickel et al.,2015). Weather data were obtained using local temperature sensors and precipitation records retrieved using the R package climate (Czernecki et al., 2020), with seasonal foraging conditions calculated based on temperature and precipitation thresholds. Statistical analysis employed DAGs to explore relationships between landscape composition, floral diversity, weather conditions, and honey bee overwintering success. Two GLMMs were fitted: one examining the effect of landscape composition on pollen diversity and ..., # Data from: Floral diversity enhances winter survival of honey bee colonies across climatic regions

Dataset DOI: [10.5061/dryad.vx0k6dk36](10.5061/dryad.vx0k6dk36)

## Description of the data and file structure

This dataset contains the data and code required to replicate the analyses investigating the relationship between landscape composition, floral resource diversity, weather conditions, and honey bee overwintering survival. Data were collected from multiple apiaries across different regions, with landscape composition quantified using QGIS and CORINE 2018 Land Cover data within a 2-km buffer around each site. Pollen diversity, used as a proxy for floral resource diversity, was assessed through monthly pollen collection from March to November 2022, followed by DNA metabarcoding for plant species identification. Weather data, including temperature and precipitation, were recorded at high temporal resolution and aggregated into seasonal foraging conditions. Statistical analyses use...,