Cédric Alaux

French National Institute for Agriculture, Food, and Environment (INRAE) | INRAE · Abeilles et Environnement

Access to adequate pollen sources in agricultural landscapes is critical for the nutrition and development of bees. The type and quantity of pollen available to bees and may be determined by local plant diversity, land-use intensity and landscape structure but different bee species likely respond differently to these parameters. Identifying communi...

Implementation of marker-assisted selection (MAS) in modern beekeeping would improve sustainability, especially in breeding programs aiming for resilience against the parasitic mite Varroa destructor. Selecting honey bee colonies for natural resistance traits, such as brood-intrinsic suppression of varroa mite reproduction, reduces the use of chemi...

Automatic monitoring devices placed at the entrances of honey bee hives have facilitated the detection of various sublethal effects related to pesticide exposure, such as homing failure and reduced flight activity. These devices have further demonstrated that different neurotoxic pesticide molecules produce similar sublethal impacts on flight activ...

Honey bee colonies have great societal and economic importance. The main challenge that beekeepers face is keeping bee colonies healthy under ever-changing environmental conditions. In the past two decades, beekeepers that manage colonies of Western honey bees (Apis mellifera) have become increasingly concerned by the presence of parasites and path...

Environmental scenarios were established for ApisRAM, a honey bee colony model currently under implementation towards version 3, i.e. for its regulatory use in the risk assessment of pesticides. These scenarios need to represent the diversity of European environments in terms of risks for honey bees, addressing the regulatory question as outlined i...

Floral resource loss and pesticide exposure are major threats to bees in intensively managed agroecosystems, but interactions among these drivers remain poorly understood. Altered composition and lowered diversity of pollen nutrition may reinforce negative pesticide impacts on bees. Here we investigated the development and survival of the solitary...

To ensure the optimal development of brood, a honeybee colony needs to regulate its temperature within a certain range of values (thermoregulation), regardless of environmental changes in biotic and abiotic factors. While the set of behavioural and physiological responses implemented by honeybees to regulate the brood temperature has been well stud...

To ensure the optimal development of brood, a honeybee colony needs to regulate its temperature within a certain range of values (thermoregulation), regardless of environmental changes in biotic and abiotic factors. While the set of behavioural and physiological responses implemented by honeybees to regulate the brood temperature has been well stud...

There is accumulating evidence that wild bees are experiencing a decline in terms of species diversity, abundance or distribution, which leads to major concerns about the sustainability of both pollination services and intrinsic biodiversity. There is therefore an urgent need to better understand the drivers of their decline, as well as design cons...

There is accumulating evidence that wild bees are experiencing a decline in terms of species diversity, abundance or distribution, which leads to major concerns about the sustainability of both pollination services and intrinsic biodiversity. There is therefore an urgent need to better understand the drivers of their decline, as well as design cons...

Pesticide exposure and food stress are major threats to bees, but their potential synergistic impacts under field-realistic conditions remain poorly understood and are not considered in current pesticide risk assessments. We conducted a semi-field experiment to examine the single and interactive effects of the novel insecticide flupyradifurone (FPF...

Toxicological studies in honeybees have long shown that a single pesticide dose or concentration does not necessarily induce a single response. Inter-individual differences in pesticide sensitivity and/or the level of exposure (e.g., ingestion of pesticide-contaminated matrices) may explain this variability in risk posed by a pesticide. Therefore,...

Wild bee populations are declining due to human activities, such as land use, which strongly affect the composition and diversity of available plants and food sources. The chemical composition of food (i.e. nutrition), in turn, determines health, resilience and fitness of bees. However, for pollinators, the term health is recent and subject to deba...

With 2,000 species currently recorded in Europe, bees are a highly diversified and efficient group of pollinating insects. They obtain their nutrients from nectar and pollen of flowers. However, the chemical composition of these resources, especially of pollen (e.g., protein, lipid, amino acids, fatty acids, or sterol content), is highly variable a...

Within the context of climate change, winter temperatures at high latitudes are predicted to rise faster than summer temperatures. This phenomenon is expected to negatively affect the diapause performance and survival of insects, since they largely rely on low temperatures to lower their metabolism and preserve energy. However, some insects like ho...

A reduction in floral resource abundance and diversity is generally observed in agro-ecosystems, along with widespread exposure to pesticides. Therefore, a better understanding on how the availability and quality of pollen diets can modulate honeybee sensitivity to pesticides is required. For that purpose, we evaluated the toxicity of acute exposur...

Pesticide risk-assessment guidelines for honeybees (Apis mellifera) generally require determining the acute toxicity of a chemical over the short-term through fix-duration tests. However, potential long-lasting or delayed effects resulting from an acute exposure (e.g. a single dose) are often overlooked, although the modification of a developmental...

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...

Due to growing anthropogenic pressures, substantial losses of honeybee colonies ( Apis mellifera ) have been reported around the world, and the species richness and abundance of most groups of wild bees have declined in recent decades across Europe and North America. Assessing the possible impacts of ongoing and future environmental changes and dev...

Assessing the various anthropogenic pressures imposed on honeybees requires characterizing the patterns and drivers of natural mortality. Using automated lifelong individual monitoring devices, we monitored worker bees in different geographical, seasonal and colony contexts creating a broad range of hive conditions. We measured their life-history t...

Assessing the various anthropogenic pressures imposed on honeybees requires characterizing the patterns and drivers of natural mortality. Using automated lifelong individual monitoring devices, we monitored worker bees in different geographical, seasonal and colony contexts creating a broad range of hive conditions. We measured their life-history t...

Division of labour is a key aspect of distributed systems, such as swarm robotics or multi-agent systems. Inspired by social insects known for their task allocation capabilities, most of the models rely on two assumptions: 1) each task is associated with a stimulus, and 2) the execution of this task lowers that stimulus. In short, the stimulus is a...

The ectoparasitic mite Varroa destructor is the most significant pathological threat to the western honey bee, Apis mellifera, leading to the death of most colonies if left untreated. An alternative approach to chemical treatments is to selectively enhance heritable honey bee traits of resistance or tolerance to the mite through breeding programs,...

The ectoparasitic mite Varroa destructor is the most significant pathological threat to the western honey bee, Apis mellifera, leading to the death of most colonies if left untreated. An alternative approach to chemical treatments is to selectively enhance heritable honey bee traits of resistance or tolerance to the mite through breeding programs,...

Exposure to multiple stress factors is believed to contribute to honey bee colony decline. However, little is known about how co-exposure to stress factors can alter the survival and behavior of free-living honey bees in colony conditions. We therefore studied the potential interaction between a neonicotinoid pesticide, thiamethoxam, and a highly p...

The Asian yellow-legged hornet Vespa velutina nigrithorax, a major predator of honeybees, is spreading in Europe in part due to a lack of efficient control methods. In this study, as a first step to identify biological control agents, we characterized viral RNA sequences present in asymptomatic or symptomatic hornets. Among 19 detected viruses, the...

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translate...

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translate...

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...

Honey bees play a critical role in the maintenance of plant biodiversity and sustainability of food webs. In the last few decades, bees have been subjected to biotic and abiotic threats causing various colony disorders. Therefore, monitoring solutions to help beekeepers to improve bee health are necessary. MALDI mass spectrometry profiling has emer...

Co-exposure to pesticides and viruses is likely to occur in honey bee colonies. Pesticides can be present in pollen, nectar, and persist in stored food (honey and bee bread), and viruses can be highly prevalent in honey bee colonies. Therefore, the present study describes the influence of chronic co-exposure to thiamethoxam and Chronic bee paralysi...

Among pollinator insects, bees undoubtedly account for the most important species. They play a critical role in boosting reproduction of wild and commercial plants and therefore contribute to the maintenance of plant biodiversity and sustainability of food webs. In the last few decades, domesticated and wild bees have been subjected to biotic and a...

In this work, we analyze the activity of bees starting at 6 days old. The data was collected at the INRA (France) during 2014 and 2016. The activity is counted according to whether the bees enter or leave the hive. After data wrangling, we decided to analyze data corresponding to a period of 10 days. We use clustering method to determine bees with...

In this work, we analyze the activity of bees starting at 6 days old. The data was collected at the INRA (France) during 2014 and 2016. The activity is counted according to whether the bees enter or leave the hive. After data wrangling, we decided to analyze data corresponding to a period of 10 days. We use clustering method to determine bees with...

Honeybee colonies are increasingly exposed to environmental stress factors, which can lead to their decline or failure. However, there are major gaps in stressor risk assessment due to the difficulty of assessing the honeybee colony state and detecting abnormal events. Since stress factors usually induce a demographic disturbance in the colony (e.g...

Expression levels of vitellogenin (A) and the receptor to adipokinetic hormone (B) as a function of bee age. The solid lines denote the average expression levels (n = 12 pools per sampling age); the dotted lines give the 95%-confidence envelopes of the expression levels with the over-dispersion parameter c equal to 0; the dashed lines give the 95%-...

Raw data from Experiment 1 (Biological age markers) and Experiment 2 (Colony monitoring and biological age of bees). (XLSX)

Scripts for the age-biomarker model and the ABC procedure. (R)

Many of the physiological traits in insects are shaped by environmental temperatures, which can influence their interactions with pathogens. Therefore, quantifying the thermal responses of the host-pathogen system is crucial for better understanding and predicting their dynamics due to environmental changes. This is particularly important in honey...

Les Systèmes Multi-Agents (SMA) ont montré depuis plusieurs années leur adéquation à modéliser et simuler les systèmes complexes. Nous suivons cette approche pour modéliser une colonie d'abeilles située dans une ruche Dadant, où plusieurs dizaine de milliers d'individus interagissent, dans le but d'évaluer l'impact d'actions locales au niveau des a...

Due to the widespread use of pesticides and their persistence in the environment, non-target organisms are chronically exposed to mixtures of toxic residues. Fungicides, herbicides and insecticides are all found at low doses in the diet of pollinators such as honey bees, but due to the lack of data on the toxicological effects of these mixtures, de...

The agent-based approach has been successfully used in the past years to model and simulate complex systems. We use this approach on a honeybee colony in a Dadant hive, where several tens of thousands of bees interact, in order to evaluate the impact of local actions at the bee-level (such as beekeeping practices) on the global system. In this arti...

Background: The parasite Varroa destructor represents a significant threat to honeybee colonies. Indeed, development of Varroa infestation within colonies, if left untreated, often leads to the death of the colony. Although its impact on bees has been extensively studied, less is known about its biology and the functional processes governing its a...

For honeybees, foraging is energetically demanding. Here we examined whether stressors, which increase metabolic demands, can impair foraging performance. A controlled non-pathogenic stressor (immune challenge) resulted in a change in foraging preferences of bees. It reduced pollen foraging, and increased the duration of trips in pollen foragers. S...

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...

The agent-based approach has been successfully used in the past years to model and simulate complex systems. We use this approach on a honeybee colony in a Dadant hive, where several tens of thousands of bees interact, in order to evaluate the impact of local actions at the bee-level (such as beekeeping practices) on the global system. In this arti...

Pathogens and pesticides are likely to co-occur in honeybee hives, but much remains to be investigated regarding their potential interactions. Here, we first investigated the metabolisation kinetics of thiamethoxam in chronically fed honeybees. We show that thiamethoxam, at a dose of 0.25. ng/bee/day, is quickly and effectively metabolised into clo...

Since climate change is expected to bring more severe and frequent extreme weather events such as heat waves, assessing the physiological and behavioural sensitivity of organisms to temperature becomes a priority. We therefore investigated the responses of honeybees, an important insect pollinator, to simulated heat waves (SHW). Honeybees are known...