Nutrition, pesticide exposure, and virus infection interactions in honey bees

Declines in pollinator health are frequently hypothesized to be the combined result of multiple interacting biotic and abiotic stressors; namely, nutritional limitations, pesticide exposure, and pathogen infection. Despite this, most studies examining stressor interactions have been constrained to two concurrent factors, limiting our understanding of multi-stressor dynamics. Using honey bees as a model, we addressed this gap by studying how variable quality diet, field-realistic levels of multiple pesticides, and virus infection interact to affect survival, infection intensity, and immune and detoxification gene expression. Although we found evidence that agrochemical exposure (a field-derived mixture of chlorpyrifos and two fungicides) can exacerbate infection and increase virus-induced mortality, this result was nutritionally-dependent, only occurring when bees were provided artificial pollen. Provisioning with naturally-collected polyfloral pollen inverted the effect, reducing virus-..., , , The code is provided as supporting data for

> Hsieh, E.M., Dolezal, A.G., 2024. Nutrition, pesticide exposure, and virus infection interact to produce context-dependent effects in honey bees (*Apis mellifera*). Science of The Total Environment 949, 175125.

### Project description:

This project was designed to investigate the tripartite effects of variable nutrition, pesticide exposure, and virus infection in pollinators using honey bees as a model. Honey bees were exposed to different combinations of the three concurrent stressors and their resulting survival, virus titers, and relative expression of key immune and detoxification genes were recorded and compared. The data and code files contained within this repository present the complete data set and should allow for recreation of the results.

All analyses performed using R version 4.3.2 and RStudio 2023.06.01 Build 524. Package versions below:
survival version 3.5-7
survminer version 0.4.9
dplyr version 1.1.4
lme4 version 1.1-...