Influence of brood deaths on Honey Bee population dynamics and the potential impact of insecticides

Honey bees (Apis mellifera) are responsible for pollinating nearly 80% of all food-producing plants, therefore, the success or failure of a colony is vital to global food production. However, not all insects are beneficial to humankind and sometimes it is necessary to reduce the population of disease-carrying mosquitoes by using insecticides. These chemical products not only affect mosquitoes but other insects such as Honey bees, causing imbalances across most ecosystems around the world. Our goal is to describe the influence of brood deaths on Honey Bee population dynamics and the potential impact of insecticides on these natural changes. We constructed a compartmental model using ordinary differential equations to describe brood birth, mortality, maturation and how the newly emerged adults live and die. To obtain our parameters we used data from 1975-76 to estimate the parameters in order to see how well our model fits the data. Finally, we implemented seasonality in our simulations to describe how the queen’s egg-laying rate changes in time. Finally we can conclude that approximately the half of the brood bees must die daily for the extinction of the population. However for the seasonality model we find that changing the brood death rate certainly changes the population dynamics but have no long time effect on the honey bee population dynamics.