%0 Journal Article
%T Nutritional Landscapes Shape Colony Resilience Long before Visible Decline: A Decision Logic for Honey Bee Feeding and Habitat Management
%A Nokuthula Dlamini
%A Sipho Zulu
%A Lars Andersen
%A Freya Nielsen
%J Entomology and Applied Science Letters
%@ 2349-2864
%D 2025
%V 12
%N 3
%R 10.51847/1oA3LfvuyX
%P 71-80
%X Honey-bee colonies can experience nutritionally consequential changes well before conspicuous losses of adult population, brood, productivity, or overwintering capacity become visible. Management decisions are nevertheless often triggered by floral abundance, hive appearance, or the availability of supplemental feed, even though these observations do not directly establish nutritional adequacy, nutrient assimilation, or resilience. This article develops an original, non-validated decision logic for nutrition-sensitive colony management by integrating evidence on nutritional landscapes, floral-resource continuity, protein, lipid and micronutrient requirements, seasonal resource gaps, colony vulnerability, supplemental feeding, habitat intervention, and sensor-supported phenotyping. The synthesis treats the colony as a superorganism in which foraging, storage, nurse physiology, brood demand, immune challenge, and collective buffering interact across time. The strongest defensible conclusion is that nutrition-sensitive decisions require sequential separation of landscape opportunity, actual colony exposure, dietary composition, changing biological demand, vulnerability, intervention uptake, and subsequent response. Neither abundant flowers nor high pollen intake alone demonstrates an adequate diet, and a short-term feeding response does not establish durable colony resilience. Important limitations include geographically bounded field studies, heterogeneous feeding formulations and outcomes, incomplete measures of assimilation, multicausal colony decline, and limited validation of automated indicators as nutrition-specific signals. The central implication is that feeding and habitat actions should be selected through a staged, reversible process that records uncertainty and demands evidence appropriate to each inferential step. The proposed logic is therefore a research and design structure for prospective testing, not a universal prescription for feeding or landscape management.
%U https://easletters.com/article/nutritional-landscapes-shape-colony-resilience-long-before-visible-decline-a-decision-logic-for-hon-l022ulpz78xvt3x