%0 Journal Article
%T Treating the Honey Bee Colony as the Patient: Integrating Social Immunity, Nutrition, Thermoregulation, Pathogens, and Behavioural Resilience
%A Victor Dupont
%A Elise Morel
%A Reem Al-Harbi
%A Omar Al-Qahtani
%J Entomology and Applied Science Letters
%@ 2349-2864
%D 2025
%V 12
%N 3
%R 10.51847/95rDJqKjdA
%P 60-70
%X Managed honey-bee health is commonly assessed through worker pathology, parasite counts, brood measures, food stores, behaviour, or sensor outputs considered separately. Yet the biologically relevant unit that survives, reproduces, regulates its internal environment, and absorbs disturbance is the colony. This article develops an evidence-grounded colony-as-patient synthesis that treats individual-bee observations as nested signals within a time-dependent superorganismal state. The approach integrates social immunity and collective defence, nutrition and energetic regulation, thermoregulation and behavioural homeostasis, pathogen pressure, resilience, and colony-level monitoring. The strongest defensible synthesis is that colony health cannot be inferred from a favourable value in any single domain: colonies may compensate for impaired workers, preserve brood temperature while consuming reserves, maintain activity while task organization deteriorates, or display defence behaviour during intensifying challenge. Conversely, an abnormal worker or sensor signal may precede dysfunction without establishing colony-level disease. The proposed model therefore distinguishes stress exposure, compensatory response, reserve depletion, recovery capacity, and systemic breakdown, and requires interpretation through repeated, cross-domain observations. Its principal limitations are the uneven transferability of field studies, the scale gap between worker experiments and colony outcomes, limited prospective validation of early-warning indicators, and uncertain causal direction among interacting stressors. The central implication is methodological rather than diagnostic: colony monitoring should be designed around trajectories, contextual normalization, signal concordance, and inspection-based corroboration. The colony-as-patient model is an original conceptual organization of existing evidence, not a clinically validated diagnostic system, and its value depends on future longitudinal testing against clearly defined colony outcomes.
%U https://easletters.com/article/treating-the-honey-bee-colony-as-the-patient-integrating-social-immunity-nutrition-thermoregulati-l3n37cm2k7f9jdv