Axel Decourtye

Unité Mixte Technologique PRADE · ITSAP-Institut de l'abeille

Beekeeping has faced increasing difficulties during the past decades, among which is the decline in floral resources. Agriculture provides essential floral resources for beekeeping, but some farming practices have also been shown to be responsible for their decline. To provide floral resources for beekeeping, what type of agricultural transformatio...

There is limited knowledge on why farmers adopt pollinator-supporting practices, which is crucial to stimulate their adoption. The dependence of farmers on pollination may influence their perception of pollinators and their willingness to adopt these practices. We addressed why farmers adopt pollinator-supporting practices using a 2011 survey condu...

Honey bees, Apis mellifera , have experienced the full impacts of globalisation, including the recent invasion by the parasite Varroa destructor , hereafter called varroa. This deadly mite has rapidly become one of the main causes of colony losses worldwide, with a huge economic impact on beekeeping. Despite the lethal effects of varroa, some colon...

It is increasingly acknowledged that bees are declining, notably as a result of global changes such as climate and land-use changes that affect the abundance and diversity of floral resources (i.e. pollen and nectar). Recently, a new concern has gained traction: the negative impact of honeybees on wild bees due to competition over floral resources....

The risk of poisoning bees by sprayed pesticides depends on the attractiveness of plants and environmental and climatic factors. Thus, to protect bees from pesticide intoxication, an usual exemption to pesticide regulations allows for spraying on blooming flowers with insecticides or acaricides when no bees are foraging on crops. Nevertheless, deci...

Background: Eusocial insects are crucial to many ecosystems, and particularly the honeybee (Apis mellifera). One approach to facilitate their study in molecular genetics, is to consider whole-colony genotyping by combining DNA of multiple individuals in a single pool sequencing experiment. Cheap and fast, this technique comes with the drawback of...

Eusocial insects, especially the honeybee (Apis mellifera), are major contributors to many ecosystems and face high levels of biotic and abiotic stress. Living in colonies the unit of interest, for phenotyping, is generally the group, making pool sequencing a relevant genomic tool for estimating genetic contributions. However, due to the multi-male...

Background Eusocial insects play a central role in many ecosystems, and particularly the important pollinator honeybee ( Apis mellifera ). One approach to facilitate their study in molecular genetics, is to consider whole colonies as single individuals by combining DNA of multiple individuals in a single pool sequencing experiment. Such a technique...

The growing gap between new evidence of pesticide toxicity in honeybees and conventional toxicological assays recommended by regulatory test guidelines emphasizes the need to complement current lethal endpoints with sublethal endpoints. In this context, behavioral and reproductive performances have received growing interest since the 2000s, likely...

Characterizing the genetic diversity of populations allows to better understand their demographic history and their adaptation to selective pressures. Social insects, such as honeybee, live in colonies which ultimately are the relevant evolutionary and selective units for such species. However, performing large scale genetic analyses of honeybees i...

Measuring time–activity budgets over the complete individual life span is now possible for many animals with the recent advances of life‐long individual monitoring devices. Although analyses of changes in the patterns of time–activity budgets have revealed ontogenetic shifts in birds or mammals, no such technique has been applied to date on insects...

Measuring time-activity budgets over the complete individual lifespan is now possible for many animals with the recent advances of life-long individual monitoring devices. Although analyses of changes in the patterns of time-activity budgets have revealed ontogenetic shifts in birds or mammals, no such technique has been applied to date on insects....

Les objectifs de ce projet étaient de développer des indicateurs précoces et non invasifs de qualité desreines d’abeilles. En parallèle, il a donc procédé (1) au développement d’un outil d’enregistrement del’activité des reines dans la ruche ainsi qu’au (2) test de la pertinence de différents indicateurs simples(poids, dynamique de colonies) en lie...

The implication of neonicotinoids in bee declines led in 2013 to an EU moratorium on three neonicotinoids in bee-attractive crops. However, neonicotinoids are frequently detected in wild flowers or untreated crops suggesting that neonicotinoids applied to cereals can spread into the environment and harm bees. Therefore, we quantified neonicotinoid...

Anyone who has already opened a hive to discover the bees that inhabit it knows that bees make sounds, perform many tasks adapted to the needs of the colony, and that they live in a world rich in odours. Thus, the concept of observing these "traces of life" in real time and from a distance using electronic sensors is attracting many beekeepers or h...

The mite Varroa destructor is known for causing devastating colony losses in the western honey bee, Apis mellifera. While chemical treatments are currently the norm in many countries, the most sustainable solution against this pest is to select and breed varroa-resistant honey bees. However, this solution is impeded by the difficulty to evaluate th...

Characterising the genetic diversity of populations allows to better understand their demographic history and their adaptation to selective pressures. In honey bees, this characterisation is facilitated by a relatively small genome size, but is hindered by the fact that often the unit of observation and sampling is the colony rather than a single i...

Keywords: Apiculture Beekeeping Forage resource management Adaptive capacity Participatory design Multicriteria assessment A B S T R A C T Beekeeping is a long-standing production of livestock, which currently faces several technical and economic challenges such as high colony losses and highly variable honey yields. While the sustainability of cur...

Neonicotinoids have been banned in France. This article (in french) evaluates the limited consequences for french viticulture. Only one neonicotinoid with different formulations is currently used, mainly against leafhoppers. In this paper we discuss the incidence for viticulture and present reasons motivating the ban. Aurhors 1 and 4 where experts...

À l'échelle d'une exploitation apicole, la capacité d'adaptation est liée à différents aspects du fonctionnement : aux pratiques de gestion du cheptel, à des choix de commercialisation ou d'organisation. Cette capacité d'adaptation contribue à la durabilité de l'exploitation en lui permettant de composer avec un contexte variable, mais constitue ég...

The concept of sustainability in agriculture has been translated into a range of operational evaluation frameworks at territory, farm or production system level. However, these frameworks are not adapted to beekeeping farms: what then can be called "sustainability" in the case of beekeeping farms? Which components of the apicultural system manageme...

Pourquoi étudier les relations entre les abeilles et l’agriculture ? Car si elles sont complexes, elles sont aussi porteuses d’espoir. Au départ, cela revient à naviguer entre des principes opposés : d’un côté le « gagnant-gagnant », les plantes cultivées apportant des ressources aux abeilles, qui en retour participent à la production de fruits et...

La diminution du coût, la miniaturisation des capteurs électroniques, ainsi que l’augmentation de leur précision et de leurs performances, permet dorénavant d’enregistrer en continu des variables physiques générées par l’abeille domestique : température, humidité et vibrations dans la ruche, poids de la ruche, entrées/sorties des butineuses. En rec...

Understanding how anthropogenic landscape alteration affects populations of ecologically- and economically-important insect pollinators has never been more pressing. In this context, the assessment of landscape quality typically relies on spatial distribution studies, but, whether habitat-restoration techniques actually improve the health of target...

Ce numéro comprend les articles correspondant aux présentations du Colloque Casdar 2017.

Ce numéro comprend les articles correspondant aux présentations du Colloque Casdar 2017.

L’approche épidémiologique de la santé de l’abeille domestique Apis mellifera est encore récente et motivée depuis quinze ans par l’augmentation des mortalités de colonies. Elle est conditionnée par des spécificités liées à la filière apicole. Dans le domaine de la surveillance, les objectifs doivent être déterminés avec précision pour s’assurer de...

Intensive agricultural systems often expose honey bees (Apis mellifera L.) to large temporal variations in the availability (quantity, quality and diversity) of nutritional resources. Such nutritional irregularity is expected to affect honey bee health. We therefore tested under laboratory conditions the effect of such variation in pollen availabil...

In France, a derogation to pesticide regulation allows spraying on blooms with insecticides or acaricides bearing the bee label (mention "Abeilles"), but only when no bees are foraging on crops. Nevertheless, no decision rule is available for farmers to assess bees' absence on the crop. To fill this gap, the Ministry of Agriculture initiated a refl...

The intensification of agricultural practices contributes to the decline of many taxa such as insects and wild plants. Weeds are serious competitors for crop production and are thus controlled. Nonetheless, weeds enhance floral diversity in agricultural landscapes. Weeds provide food for insects in exchange for pollination. The stability of mutuali...

The toxicity of pesticides used in agriculture towards non-targeted organisms and especially pollinators has recently drawn the attention from a broad scientific community. Increased honeybee mortality observed worldwide certainly contributes to this interest. The potential role of several neurotoxic insecticides in triggering or potentiating honey...

Durant les 50 dernières années, l’intensification agricole a profondément modifié la physionomie des paysages en Europe. Pour satisfaire les demandes croissantes des populations humaines, les systèmes de grandes cultures produisent aujourd’hui des céréales, maïs et autres oléagineux sur des surfaces de plus en plus étendues, au détriment de la dive...

Erreurs d'affiliations dans la revue pour Bretagnolle, Odoux, Aupinel et Henry. Corrigés dans cette notice

Recent studies succeeded in developing a method to automatically record honeybees going in and out of the hive. Honeybees were individualized with radio frequency identification (RFID) tags glued onto their dorsal surface and detected at the hive entrance by readers emitting high-frequency (HF) radio waves. In this work we search for a possible adv...

Observed average instantaneous speed during the 3-min recording time as compared to the 95% confidence limits (shaded area) for an expected steady-state average speed. The instantaneous speed during the 3-min recording time was measured in a pilot study performed on 80 non-exposed individual bees. The mean instantaneous speed (mm.s-1) was averaged...

Effect size estimates for variations of distance covered by individuals (a) among control groups of the five trials and (b) between treatment and control groups. Horizontal bars stand for the 95% confidence intervals returned by the post-hoc multiple pairwise comparisons. The vertical dashed line indicates the no-effect level. (TIF)

Individual distances covered by bees in each group. Individual distances (in meters) covered by control bees and exposed bees are plotted as white and grey dots respectively, for each insecticide. Average distances (± S.E.M) are shown for each modality. Mean distances in control groups were similar (3.14 ± 0.24 m, 3.26 ± 0.29 m, 3.50 ± 0.27 m, 3.22...

Mortality tests for the determination of sublethal doses. (XLSX)

Statistical outputs of LM and LMM models comparing distances covered by individuals (m) among control groups of the five trials, and between treatments. The post-hoc pairwise comparisons indicate that only the fipronil treatment did not significantly affect distances. See S2 Fig for effect size estimates. (DOCX)

European governments have banned the use of three common neonicotinoid pesticides due to insufficiently identified risks to bees. This policy decision is controversial given the absence of clear consistency between toxicity assessments of those substances in the laboratory and in the field. Although laboratory trials report deleterious effects in h...

L’originalité de cet ouvrage est d’établir le lien entre paysages et bonne santé des abeilles, les modifications paysagères pouvant impacter leurs modes de vie. Il aborde la disponibilité des ressources en pollen et en nectar pour les abeilles en fonction des paysages, du type de zones géographiques, de la végétation et des pratiques agricoles et a...

Juvenile hormone (JH) plays an important role in honeybee development and the regulation of age-related division of labor. However, honeybees can be exposed to insect growth regulators (IGRs), such as JH analogs developed for insect pest and vector control. Although their side effects as endocrine disruptors on honeybee larval or adult stages have...

Honeybees are polylectic insects able to forage on many flower species in order to provide enough abundant and diverse food for the colony. However, land use changes and agricultural intensification have disrupted the floral availability in agricultural landscapes. Here, we investigated empirically the floral resources used by honeybees in an inten...

In intensive farmland habitats, pollination of wild flowers and crops may be threatened by the widespread decline of pollinators. The honey bee decline, in particular, appears to result from the combination of multiple stresses, including diseases, pathogens, and pesticides. The reduction of semi-natural habitats is also suspected to entail floral...

variants? — or both. Honeybees host more than 50 types of microbe, which next-generation sequenc-ing technologies are helping us to explore. Researchers are trying to determine which microbes are pathogens and how to control them. We need to understand how pathogens interact with other stressors — pesticides and poor nutrition — in ways that harm h...

Seven scientists give their opinions on the biggest challenges faced by bees and bee researchers.

The collapse of honeybee populations, described around the world for twenty years, is particularly alarming because it causes the decline of beekeeping and of an essential pollinator in agricultural habitats. Surprisingly, the land use changes and the lack of floral resources in intensive agricultural landscapes are few investigate actually in the...