Document Type
Article
Source Publication Title
Mathematical Biosciences and Engineering
First Page
1275
Last Page
1294
DOI
http://dx.doi.org/10.3934/mbe.2014.11.1275
Abstract
Honeybee pollination accounts annually for over $14 billion in United States agriculture alone. Within the past decade there has been a mysterious mass die-off of honeybees, an estimated 10 million beehives and sometimes as much as 90% of an apiary. There is still no consensus on what causes this phenomenon, called Colony Collapse Disorder, or CCD. Several mathematical models have studied CCD by only focusing on infection dynamics. We created a model to account for both healthy hive dynamics and hive extinction due to CCD, modeling CCD via a transmissible infection brought to the hive by foragers. The system of three ordinary differential equations accounts for multiple hive population behaviors including Allee effects and colony collapse. Numerical analysis leads to critical hive sizes for multiple scenarios and highlights the role of accelerated forager recruitment in emptying hives during colony collapse.
Disciplines
Mathematics | Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Publication Date
12-1-2014
Language
English
License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Recommended Citation
Kribs, Christopher David and Mitchell, Christopher, "Modeling colony collapse disorder in honeybees as a contagion" (2014). Mathematics Faculty Publications. 3.
https://mavmatrix.uta.edu/math_facpubs/3
Comments
This article grew out of a project supported by NSF UBM-Institutional grant DUE-0827136 as part of the UTTER Program at UT Arlington (http://www.uta.edu/math/utter). The authors of this manuscript acknowledge and thank their co-authors on the original project.