Bees: American Foulbrood affecting honey bees larvae

In romunov/AED: Package Accompanying 'Mixed Effects Models and Extensions in Ecology with R'

Description

Data on Paenibacillus larvae spore forming bacteria infecting queen, drone and worker larvae

Usage

data("Bees")

Details

Larvae of bees (Apies mellifera) are affected by AFB (American foulbrood disease) caused by Paenibacillus larvae and can cause colony collapse. The infectious form of the bacterium, the spores, enters the larvae gut and continue to multiply until death of the said larvae. Adults are not directly affected, but day-to-day hive work by adults may contribute to its spread within and between colonies.

AFB is highly contagious, hard to cure and lethal at the colony level. Economically, it makes sense to detect early outbreaks. Detecting is done by sampling of adult bees and Hornitzky and Karlovskis (1989) have devised a way to culture adult honey bees for AFB and demonstrated that spores can be detected from colonies without clinical symptoms.

This dataset includes data on 24 hives with three nested observations per hive. In the book, authors used this dataset to demonstrate mixed effects modeling, including modeling variance structure using generalized least squares.

Available variables are:

• rawdata: To be determined

• spore_density: Density of spores, book uses name Spobee. Method of producing the data is deferring reader to the original paper. The technique is pretty gruesome, so I'll defer interested reader to the original work as well.

• hive: Factor indicating hive membership

• x: Assuming x coordinate of the hive position

• y: Assuming y coordinate of the hive position

• infection: Whether the hive is considered infected or not

• bee_count: Estimated number of bees in a hive, used as BeesN in the book

References

Hornitzky MAZ and Karlovskis S. 1989. A culture technique for the Bacillus larvae in honeybees. Journal of apicultural research 28(2): 118-120.

Zuur et al. 2009. Mixed effects models and extensions in ecology with R. Springer. ISBN: 978-0-387-87457-9.

romunov/AED documentation built on May 13, 2021, 5:12 p.m.