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Industrial bees: when agricultural intensification doesn’t impact local disease prevalence

Although it is generally thought that the intensification of farming will result in higher disease prevalences there is little specific modelling testing this idea. We build multi-colony models to inform how ‘apicultural intensification’ is predicted to impact honeybee pathogen epidemiology at the apiary scale. Counter to the prevailing view, our models predict that intensification, captured though increased population sizes, changes in population network structure, and increased between-colony transmission, is likely to have little effect on disease prevalence within an apiary. The greatest impacts of intensification are found for diseases with relatively low R0 (basic reproduction number), however, such diseases cause little overall disease prevalence and therefore the impacts of intensification are minor. Furthermore, the smallest impacts of intensification are found for diseases with high R0 values, which we argue are typical of important honeybee diseases. Policy Implications: Our findings highlight a lack of support for the hypothesis that current and ongoing intensification leads to notably higher disease prevalences. More broadly, our work demonstrates the need for informative models of agricultural systems and management practices in order to understand the implications of management changes on diseases.