A suite of pathogens are known to infect both wild and managed bee populations. Diseases caused by these pathogens have have been identified as a driver of population declines and impaired ecosystem services. Feeding sites facilitate direct and indirect contact between hosts - other bees - and may create hotspots of disease transmission. In bees, spillover between individuals and species via contact with shared flowers has been clearly demonstrated, but a full understanding of transmission dynamics in forage sites remains ellusive. I have developed a multi-species, vector born disease mathematical model to explore the relationships of these traits and illustrate their impact on pathogen spread. This model highlights the role of differences in species susceptibility, bee population size, bee contact rate with flowers, and forage plot density. This provides a novel framework with which we can assess transmission dynamics in forage sites and integrate existing experiments with our own. Model devlopment and exploration was paired with field observations in controlled foraging plots to measure visitation rates in forage sites with varied floral community composition. These observations provide data for empirically based model parameters and provide further insight into transmission dynamics at bee foraging sites.
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