2nd Place: D3099: The effects of resource competition and virus transmission between honey bees and native bees

Honey bees and native bees both perform important agricultural and ecosystem services. However, interactions between these two groups may lead to competition, which could shift native bee community structures through a depletion of pollen resources and/or pathogen transmission. The real-world implications of these interactions remains unclear. We addressed this knowledge gap by assessing native bee communities, flower visitation from bees, and pathogen presence at locations where honey bee apiaries have been present >10 years and at sites with no documented history of beekeeping. In total we had ten field locations; 5 sites with apiaries and 5 without apiaries. Locations were overall similar in surrounding landscape coverage with a 1km buffer and consisted of ≥70% agriculture. Sampling efforts were conducted from June-September to capture bee abundance and richness via elevated pan traps, bee visitation to flower patches, and the richness and abundance of flowering communities. We screened collected bees for honey bee pathogens and measured morphological characteristics. We calculated preliminary results investigating differences in bee abundance and richness at our apiary and non-apiary sites for the month of August, the period during which bee activity should be at its highest, from data collected in 2021. We found no statistical differences between native bee community abundance (p = 0.385) or richness (p = 0.284) between site types. Future analyses will include data collected during the 2022 field season to explore differences between our sites in bee visitation rates, morphological differences between native bees, and to determine if pathogen spillover is occurring.