A suite of pathogens are known to spread through both wild and managed bee populations and have been identified as a driver of population declines. Feeding sites facilitate direct and indirect contact between hosts and may create hotspots of disease transmission. In bees, spillover between individuals and species via contact with shared flowers has been clearly demonstrated. It remains unclear to what degree forage sites may serve as hotspots and how species and ecosystem traits may impact transmission dynamics. We 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 importance of differences in species susceptibility, bee population size, bee contact rate with flowers, and forage plot density. The populations in this model trend towards an equilibrium point - at which a fixed proportion is maintained as infected. This provides a novel framework with which we can assess transmission dynamics in forage sites and integrate existing experiments with our own. Bee visit rates to flowers have not been well recorded, so we also conducted field observations on controlled foraging plots to measure visitation rates in forage sites with varied floral community composition. Analysis of these observations will provide empirically based parameter estimates for our mathematical model and illustrate differences in foraging behavior between bee species.
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