VOODOO

This project aims to assess the risk of spill-over of honeybee viruses to wild pollinators. It has been shown in experiments that visiting the same flowers as honeybees exposes wild pollinators to honeybee viruses. Specifically, we want to find out how urban and agricultural land use and their respective floral resource availability impacts honeybee virus prevalence in the wild pollinator community.

Wild bees provide essential ecosystem functions by pollinating wild plants and crops. However, they are facing many threats: Conversion of natural land into agricultural fields has caused a loss of floral and nesting resources and intensive agriculture with increased pesticide use negatively affects bee health. Besides these threats, trade with honeybees across continents has led to a spread of pathogens and parasites among pollinators. For example, the red mason bee (Osmia bicornis) was shown to harbour at least eight of the known honeybee RNA viruses. Honeybee densities in a landscape, floral resource availability and the structure of the plant-pollinator network are expected to influence the risk of pathogen spill-over from honeybees to wild bees. In the VOODOO project, we investigate how land-use (conventional intensive agriculture, rural mosaic or urban land), honeybee density and flower resource availability influence virus prevalence in the wild pollinator community. The project comprises field-sampling of plant-pollinator-virus communities, laboratory and field experiments, modelling and analysing perception of disease risk among stakeholders.

VOODOO is a BiodivERsA project including partners from Switzerland, France, Germany and Poland. In Switzerland, Agroscope Reckenholz is leading the field-work part and plant-pollinator community analyses of the project, while the Institute of Bee Health of the University of Bern is responsible for the molecular analyses. Find out more under external pagehttps://voodoo-project.eucall_made

Contact information

Corina Maurer

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