Spatial distribution and environmental drivers of wild honey bee nesting patterns in the Eastern Cape Province, South Africa

Spatial clusters of animal nests can be driven by mating behaviors, social benefits, and landscape heterogeneity. Unmanaged honey bees (Hymenoptera: Apidae: Apis spp.) have been documented nesting in clustered spatial distributions. However, environmental features influencing unmanaged honey bee nesting patterns have been largely understudied, especially for wild honey bees ( A. mellifera ) across Africa. We worked in the Eastern Cape Province, South Africa to characterize the spatial distribution and environmental drivers of wild honey bee nesting patterns. We surveyed 1 km 2 grid cells for wild honey bee nests using beelining techniques, with which we followed foragers from stands with sugar water to their nest entrances. We used nest locality data to test for complete spatial randomness using Monte Carlo simulations with mean nearest-neighbor distances. We used generalized linear mixed-effects models and a model selection approach to explore impacts of 11 land management, vegetation, and terrain covariates on patterns of nest density (nests/0.25 km 2 ). We located 97 occupied nests within 16 km 2 across five field sites. Wild honey bee colonies nested in both clustered and random spatial patterns. Greater nest densities were associated with rangeland, low percent land cover and high edge density of low vegetation, and southward-facing downhill slopes. Our exploration of environmental features influencing honey bee nesting provides new information about the distribution of wild honey bee nests across environments. We outline future directions for hypothesis-driven experiments to inform land management strategies for the conservation of honey bees in South Africa.