Managed honey bee colonies face multiple health risks including nutritional stress, exposure to pests and pathogens, poor queen quality, and pesticide contamination, which cause problems at the individual and colony levels. The reproductive quality (fertility and fecundity) and health of a queen are essential to ensure colony growth, survival, and productivity."Several factors have been identified that may ultimately affect the quality and productivity of the honey bee queen. In colonies, honey bees are normally adept at thermoregulating (Stabentheiner et al. 2010), but queens are vulnerable to heat-shock andcold-shock events during shipping (Pettis et al. 2016; McAfee et al. 2020a), where they are regularly transported long distances via ground or air cargo in poorly thermoregulated environments (Withrow et al. 2019). In a colony, worker bees can try to lessen the effects of overheating by collecting water and fanning to achieve evaporative cooling, or by heat-shielding, using their own bodies as heat-blocking insulation (Stabentheiner et al. 2010; Starks and Gilley 1999). Likewise, they can mitigate chilling by vibrating their wing muscles to generate heat (Stabentheiner et al. 2010). However, in small queen cages used for shipping, there is often limited (if any) water, poor ventilation and too few workers to effectively cool or heat the queen. Temperature loggers have been included in long distance queen shipments and have shown that both hot and cold temperature spikes regularly occur (Pettis et al. 2016; McAfee et al. 2020a) (McAfee et al. 2020b)."
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