Social insects include the termites, ants and the social bees and wasps, which are a very large and ecologically very successful group of animals. They are also of tremendous importance for humans. Whereas some social insects are serious pest species that become increasingly difficult to control, others are of central importance for agricultural food production. Honeybees for example are among the first animals that humans domesticated thousands of years ago and have since become of central importance to provide pollination services for more than 80 crops of agricultural interest. The services of bees have largely been taken for granted, but substantial declines of pollinating insect populations have been documented over recent years and have by now become of global concern. A number of factors have been identified that are responsible for declining pollinator health. However, our current ability to effectively restore and maintain bee health remains rather limited, especially if compared to other domesticated animals. Part of the problematic is that insect societies are extremely complex super organisms, where the success of a colony is not only defined by the performance of an individual, but also through very sophisticated interactions and information flow among colony members and their environment. Safeguarding honeybees and their pollination services will therefore depend on a detailed understanding of the functioning of these societies as well as to unravel the earliest possible indicators of declining colony health. The development of novel tools for beekeepers to manage the health of their bees will in the future will require a close collaboration between biologists to conduct field based experiments to understand the effects of different environmental stressors on colony performance and health, chemists to unravel the molecular signatures that are associated with declining bee health, and engineers that are not only able to continuously monitor bee health related variables but also use approaches of artificial intelligence to reliably detected the earliest onsets of declining bee health.

Prof. Boris Baer