Data from: Semi-natural habitats mitigate early behavioral maturation of honey bees in farmlands

This dataset result from the monitoring of the life history of many honey bee individuals in an intensive agricultural area in western France, consisting of temporally and spatially fluctuating floral resources, using radio-frequency identification (RFID). Overall, we monitored the lifespan (LSP), age at first exit (AFE), foraging tenure, and foraging intensity of 1035 honey bees along a landscape gradient of semi-natural habitats in farmlands. We found a clear acceleration of behavioral maturation of bees during the period of food shortage, with precocity in AFE between 6 and 10 days earlier and reduced LSP by 5 to 9 days, with no effect on foraging tenure or foraging intensity. We also found that higher proportions of semi-natural habitats mitigated behavioral maturation of bees by up to 6 days. Beyond the direct effects on adult bees, we found no delayed effect of larval feeding status on adult life-history traits or foraging behavior. Nevertheless, our results suggest that promoting the conservation of semi-natural habitats in intensive agricultural landscapes could benefit honey bee colony survival.
The data are related to the scientific paper "Verrier E., et al. (under review) Semi-natural habitats mitigate early behavioral maturation of honey bees in farmlands. PNAS".
Data are available as a RData file titled "dataTHV.RData".
# 'data.frame' : 1035 obs. of 9 variables :
$site : unique alphanumeric ID of the hive location
$id_abeille_sc : unique alphanumeric ID of the bee
$season : period of bee introduction ('April', 'May', 'June' or 'July')
$typeB : hive origin of the bee ('ex_situ' from the control colony or 'in_situ' from the in situ colony)
$LSP : lifespan of the bee (in days)
$AFE : age of first exit of the bee (in days)
$FSP : foraging tenure of the bee (in days)
$FI : foraging intensity of the bee (in hours)
$Semi.Nartural_occupancy_rate : proportion of semi-natural habitats within a radius of 1.5 km around the hive (in percentage)