A biophysical approach to assess weather impacts on honey bee colony winter mortality

The western honey bee (Apis mellifera) is one of the most important insects kept by humans, but high colony losses are reported around the world. While the effects of general climatic conditions on colony winter mortality were already demonstrated, no study has investigated specific weather conditions linked to biophysical processes governing colony vitality. Here, we quantify the comparative relevance of four such processes that co-determine the colonies' fitness for wintering during the annual hive management cycle, using a 10-year dataset of winter colony mortality in Austria that includes 266 378 bee colonies. We formulate four process-based hypotheses for wintering success and operationalize them with weather indicators. The empirical data is used to fit simple and multiple linear regression models on different geographical scales. The results show that approximately 20% of winter mortality variability can be explained by the analysed weather conditions, and that it is most sensitive to the duration of extreme cold spells in mid and late winter. Our approach shows the potential of developing weather indicators based on biophysical processes and discusses the way forward for applying them in climate change studies.