IMPACTS OF CURRENT AGRICULTURAL MANAGEMENT ON PLANT AND POLLINATOR MICROBIAL COMMUNITIES IN PUMPKIN AGROECOSYSTEMS

As the honey bee population in the US is rapidly declining due to the rise of Varroa mites, pathogens, and multiple other complications, we will have to shift our focus on sustaining the number of native bees present in our crop production systems to meet our increasing food demands. Pumpkins have a native ground-nesting specialist bee pollinator known as the squash bee, that can be utilized as a model to understand risks that might be present in an agricultural production setting to our native bees. This includes areas where spillover of pollinator viruses could occur and the risk of pesticide exposure to bees in the environment. Pumpkins are very susceptible to fungal and bacterial diseases and are sprayed approximately every 7-10 days with a combination of pesticides. However, we do not currently know if there are pesticide residues accumulating in the soil, and plants, what effect they may have on the bee population nor how these pesticides could be impacting pathogen loads for bees and plants throughout the season. This project aims to assess pathogen and pesticide load in both squash bees and pumpkin plants throughout the growing season to inform policy that can minimize risk to native pollinators while encouraging plant health in the future. To this end, we propose two research objectives: Objective 1: Characterize plant pathogens, bee viruses, and pesticide residues present in the soil and plant tissues throughout the growing season to identify areas of risk to pollinators present within the field. Objective 2: Examine Squash bees for plant viruses, bee viruses, and pesticide residues while employing techniques to analyze pesticide presence and change in disease levels and bee gut microbiome through analysis of bacterial (16S) and fungal (ITS) communities present.