Honeybees show tipping points
Friday, May 16, 2014 - 08:30
in Biology & Nature
Parasites, lack of food, cold snaps, pesticides, and poor management all can stress honeybee colonies, making it difficult to pin their collapse on a single source. However, in controlled field tests, honeybee colonies show evidence of Allee effects (a positive correlation between population size and individual fitness) and tipping points that are early warning indicators of collapse, MIT physics graduate student Lei Dai says.