Too Much Honeybee, Too Little Everything Else?

Application summary

Everyone knows that the honeybee is in trouble. Walk into any bookshop and half of the books in the nature section will be about the honeybee. Likewise the scientific literature. But what about the other > 20 000 social insect species? We know virtually nothing about how stressors such as pesticides, parasites, and climate change, affect their survival. My proposal addresses this bias in two phases. Phase 1 is to use two literature synthesis techniques, literature mapping and meta-analysis, to quantitatively identify what we know / don’t know about which social insect insect species have been studied, where they have been studied, and what has been studied. Phase 2 will use the results from phase 1 to fill in the gaps in our knowledge by conducting experiments on how stressors influence lifespan in two understudied Finnish species and in as many species from the global tropics as possible by utilising a collaborative network of 20 researchers. This combination of approaches will challenge prevailing views based on the honeybee alone and help safeguard the future of social insects, which are vital to the health of our planet.