Viral dynamics across managed and wild pollinators: Integrating immunity, ecology, and community structure

Fri, 10 Apr 2026 10:00:00 -0400

Managed honey bees (Apis mellifera) are critical agricultural pollinators, yet colonies continue to experience persistently high losses across North America and Europe. These declines are driven by interacting stressors, including parasites, pathogens, nutrition, and landscape context. Viral pathogens, in particular, are key contributors to colony morbidity and mortality, but the processes governing variation in viral prevalence, load, and host response remain incompletely understood. This dissertation investigates how honey bee viral dynamics emerge from interactions among host immunity, colony condition, environmental context, and pollinator community structure. By integrating measures of viral prevalence, viral load, and immune gene expression across multiple biological scales, this dissertation examines how these factors structure disease patterns within and beyond managed colonies. Chapter 1 examines how management and landscape context influence viral trends and immune gene expression in honey bees, identifying ecological correlates of variation in host-pathogen interactions within a single species. Chapter 2 expands to a multi-host framework, quantifying spatial patterns of viral presence in honey bees and non-Apis pollinators to evaluate community-level disease structure. Chapter 3 explores multi-year temporal dynamics at a single site, comparing seasonal viral patterns in honey bees and non-Apis pollinators while relating these trends to honey bee immune activity and potential lagged host–pathogen interactions. Together, this work demonstrates that viral dynamics in pollinator systems are structured, multi-scale processes shaped by ecological and physiological interactions. By characterizing viral and immune variation across spatial, temporal, and community contexts, this dissertation highlights the ecological processes shaping disease dynamics in pollinators.

Allison Malay

Dr. Kenneth Fedorka