Monitoring of honey bee colony losses in Northern Bukovyna over the 2014-2015 winter

Increasing of plowing and widespread use of pesticides has led to a drastic reduction of diversity of insect-pollinators, including honey bees. In recent years, there can be observed a global extinction of bees (“colony collapse syndrome”, “collapse of bee colonies”), described for the first time in 2006. The reason for this phenomenon is not completely understood. The international non-profit association COLOSS – Prevention of honey bee COlony LOSSes is the organization that has been evaluating losses of bee colonies worldwide, since 2007. For the first time Ukraine joined the world monitoring in 2015 due to our assistance. Beekeepers survey was conducted using a standardized questionnaire developed by COLOSS. It was translated and adapted for better understanding of the respondents. In general, we processed the results of a survey of 300 beekeepers from 18 regions of Ukraine with the largest sample from Chernivtsi region. We followed zoning by L. I. Voropai (2004). Beekeepers from three major physiographic regions of Northern Bukovyna were interviewed: the Prut-Dniester area of high forest steppe plains, the Prut-Siret high hilly forest-meadow area and the area of Beskid Mountains in the Carpathians. We analysed some of the results of the monitoring of Apis mellifera Linnaeus, 1758 colony losses on the apiaries in Northern Bukovyna after winter 2014-2015. It was found that colony winter loss in North Bukovyna during the investigated period averaged 10.7% (on the territory of the countries participating in international monitoring COLOSS – an average of 17.4%). The lowest rates were noted for the Prut-Dniester area of high forest steppe plains (7.4%), and the highest – for the area of Beskid Mountains in the Carpathians (22.0%). 83.3% of the colony winter loss on the apiaries of Northern Bukovyna were caused by their deaths, while 16.7% – by queen problems (on the territory of the countries participating in international monitoring COLOSS mentioned indicators were 82.8% and 17.2% respectively). The analysis of peculiarities of the bee colony losses in the studied region proved that most of those lost colonies had dead workers in cells and no food present in the hive. Beekeepers from Northern Bukovyna didn't mark worsening of the situation with queens in 2014, compared with previous years. In addition, the appropriateness of queen replacing before the winter period has not been clearly proved.