TY  - JOUR
T1  - Multiple Stressors, One Superorganism: An Umbrella Review of Nutritional, Chemical, Parasitic, Pathogenic, and Climatic Threats to Honey Bees
A1  - Nguyen Thanh Huy
A1  - Pham Quang Minh
A1  - Le Thi Bich
A1  - Maria Gonzalez
JF  - Entomology and Applied Science Letters
JO  - Entomol Appl Sci Lett
SN  - 2349-2864
Y1  - 2025
VL  - 12
IS  - 1
DO  - 10.51847/1oSaiRoZfQ
SP  - 30
EP  - 41
N2  - Honey-bee colonies function as integrated biological systems whose survival depends on coordinated nutrition, brood production, division of labour, immune defence, thermoregulation, and resource storage. This organization can buffer temporary disturbances, but it also permits stress originating in particular workers, life stages, or food-processing pathways to propagate through the colony. Evidence concerning honey-bee decline is distributed across reviews of nutritional limitation, landscape simplification, pesticide exposure, parasitic infestation, infectious disease, immune disruption, and climatic stress. These literatures frequently employ different endpoints and analytical scales, making apparent agreement difficult to interpret and preventing individual-level responses from being treated automatically as predictors of colony failure. This umbrella review critically integrates review-level evidence across the principal stressor domains while using selected mechanistic and colony-level studies to clarify biological pathways and interpretive boundaries. The synthesis indicates that nutritional scarcity, chemical exposure, parasites, pathogens, and adverse climatic conditions can each erode components of colony function, but their consequences depend strongly on exposure duration, season, colony demography, resource availability, infection pressure, and compensatory social mechanisms. Co-occurring stressors therefore should not be assumed to interact synergistically, and early molecular, physiological, or behavioural changes should not be interpreted as inevitable colony collapse. The strongest evidence supports a resilience-centred perspective in which colony risk reflects the balance between accumulated stress load and the superorganism’s capacity to redistribute labour, regulate the nest environment, sustain brood care, preserve food quality, and control infection. Progress requires longitudinal colony-scale studies, explicit evaluation of overlapping evidence among reviews, and digital phenotyping systems that connect early biological signals with later functional outcomes without overstating predictive certainty.
UR  - https://easletters.com/article/multiple-stressors-one-superorganism-an-umbrella-review-of-nutritional-chemical-parasitic-patho-9exdsrmi8tzex7t
ER  -