ORCID

https://orcid.org/0009-0009-6426-6127

Keywords

disease ecology, pollinators, viral spillover, community ecology

Abstract

Managed honey bees (Apis mellifera) are critical agricultural pollinators, yet colonies continue to experience persistently high losses across North America and Europe. These declines are driven by interacting stressors, including parasites, pathogens, nutrition, and landscape context. Viral pathogens are key contributors to colony morbidity and mortality, but the processes governing variation in viral prevalence, load, and host response remain incompletely understood. This dissertation investigates how viral dynamics in honey bees emerge from interactions among host immunity, colony condition, environmental context, and pollinator community structure. By integrating measures of viral prevalence, viral load, and immune gene expression across multiple biological scales, it examines how these factors structure disease patterns within and beyond managed colonies. Chapter 2 evaluates how management practices and landscape context influence viral trends and immune gene expression, identifying ecological drivers of host-pathogen interactions within honey bees. Chapter 3 expands to a multi-host framework, quantifying spatial patterns of viral presence in honey bees and non-Apis pollinators to assess community-level disease structure. Chapter 4 investigates multi-year temporal dynamics at a single site, comparing seasonal viral patterns across taxa and relating these trends to honey bee immune activity and lagged host-pathogen interactions. Together, these findings show that viral dynamics in pollinator systems are structured across spatial, temporal, and biological scales, rather than occurring as isolated infection events. By linking host physiology with ecological context, this work provides a more integrative understanding of how pathogens circulate within pollinator communities and highlights the importance of multi-scale approaches for predicting and managing disease risk in pollinators.

Completion Date

2026

Semester

Spring

Committee Chair

Fedorka, Kenneth

Degree

Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.)

College

College of Sciences

Department

Biological Sciences

Format

PDF

Document Type

Dissertation

Identifier

DP0053231

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