Effects of land cover on honey bee foraging performance: Analysis for 185 sites in Germany

Honey bee foraging is strongly influenced by landscape composition and weather. While the interactions of these two drivers have been studied on smaller scales, large-scale studies across various landscapes are scarce. Using readily available data, we investigated the influence of land cover on honey bee foraging performance under prevailing weather conditions. We analysed hive weight data provided by the TrachtNet monitoring system, collected at 185 sites across Germany in 2020. From the corrected annual cumulative hive weight describing honey bee foraging performance, we derived five target variables and investigated the effects of selected land cover types and their interactions using generalized linear models (GLMs). Our results show that land cover interactions had a significant effect on the foraging performance. In agricultural landscapes mass flowering crops in combination with any other land cover types prolonged the main foraging period, suggesting that diverse landscapes provide more floral resources throughout the season. However, high remaining unexplained variation indicates that ecological complexity could not be reflected in the models sufficiently, most likely due to data aggregation, simplification and missing colony-level variables. The study contributes to the understanding of how landscape composition affects honey bee foraging and adds to existing methods for combining and analysing data at different spatial and temporal scales.