The 60^th volume of the Journal of Apicultural Research - a look into the past and future

This is the fifth and final issue of the 60th volume of the Journal of Apicultural Research (JAR) - an excellent opportunity to reflect on the highlights in honey bee research and revise the latest developments of our journal. In this extended editorial, we briefly review the importance of JAR in a historical context, followed by the latest developments in the field of honey bee research in terms of main contributors and topics. Then, we look into the latest developments of JAR regarding its impact. Finally, we share our view on the future topics in bee research and conclude by thanking all involved parties for the ongoing success of JAR.

JAR legacy and the importance of JAR for IBRA

2021 marks nearly 60 years since the publication of the very first volume of JAR, which was put together in 1962 by the (then called) Bee Research Association (BRA), now called the International Bee Research Association (IBRA). It seems almost unbelievable from the point of view of today's highly online interconnected world that JAR was created at a time when there was no internet! It was extremely difficult for colleagues in different parts of the world to share their latest results in bee research. The first volume contained only one issue, which included the Note from the first Editors, Eva Crane & James Simpson, who introduced this new opportunity for publication: “The journal will cover all aspects of bees, Apis and non-Apis, and substances used or produced by them, their pollinating activities, and organisms causing diseases or injuries to them. It will also cover research on methods and equipment for the management of bees and their products, but not other aspects of these subjects.” Since the first issue, more than 2,800 scientific articles co-authored by about, 1900 researchers have been published in JAR. Some of these researchers, including Professors Jerzy Woyke, Thomas E. Rinderer, Peter Neumann, and S. Cameron Jay, have contributed more than 30 publications each, which have resulted in hundreds, sometimes thousands, of citations.

JAR has always been the most consistent revenue stream for IBRA. This income has allowed IBRA to distribute resources, free of charge, to many regions around the world. It also allowed IBRA to provide seed funds for projects that would not otherwise have been initiated. Some of these projects went on to attract large amounts of government funding for development. For example, whilst at IBRA, Nicola Bradbear acquired experience in using beekeeping to improve the lives of disadvantaged populations and developed the skills that she has used since the successful establishment of the charity Bees for Development. Most importantly, Eva Crane was dedicated to maintaining high standards, and this was reflected in the respect that was afforded to JAR by the scientific community. This allowed IBRA to hold international conferences around the world, which were widely attended by top researchers in the field and encouraged young scientists to develop their interests in bee research.

The history of the first 50 years of JAR was already reviewed by Carreck (2011) and included highlights of some outstanding articles as well as tables of Senior Editors, Editorial Board Members, Associate, and Assistant Editors. In this 60th volume editorial, we will thus focus on the progress that JAR has made in the past decade.

Honey bee research in the past decade - main contributors to JAR

There is a growing number of bee research articles published each year worldwide by different journals (Figure 1), in particularly in the last decade. This acceleration in bee research efforts is also experienced by JAR editors, as we receive an ever increasing amount of submissions each year, which led to an accumulation of accepted articles that were published during the last few years extra print pages kindly offered by IBRA. This trend also led us to follow a more strict review and acceptance policy such that now only manuscripts with JAR's highest standard and quality can be proceeded to review. The main contributors to this increase are listed in Figure 2. Among these contributors are researchers from North America, Europe, South America (Martín Javier Eguaras), and Asia (Panuwan Chantawannakul). Interestingly 33% of the researchers who published in JAR in the past ten years were associated with organizations from Asia and South America, showing that they are emerging as key contributors to bee research.

Figure 1. Number of scientific articles published on the topic of honey bees since 1962, year of the foundation of the Journal of Apicultural Reserach, until 2020. Articles containing the terms bee, honey bee, or Apis mellifera, in either their abstract, title or keywords were included. Data retrieved from the Scopus Database (www.scopus.com) on 7th September 2021.

Figure 2. The main contributors to JAR publications in the last 10 years (2011-2020). Source: www.scopus.com, data exported on 7th September 2021.

Main topics of publications in the last decade

In the last decade, in particular since the first description of colony collapse disorder in 2006, the most studied topics in bee research have included issues associated with Varroa destructor parasitization (Hassler et al. 2021), as it was (and still is) a major factor in colony losses worldwide. One positive outcome from these colony losses was an increased realization of the importance of honey bees as pollinators in modern agriculture. This led to growing research efforts on the impacts of honey bees as providers of crucial ecosystem services, as well as the potential consequences of their decline. Today, V. destructor and the associated viruses that it vectors have now secured a place in the bee research community as one of the most studied threats (Zakaria et al., 2021). In addition, Tropilaelaps mercedesae, which amongst others has its original hosts in giant honey bees, has spilled over to western honey bees as alternative hosts, which has expanded the mite’s host range to temperate zones, including South Korea and China. Vespa velutina is another example of a species expanding its host range from Southeast Asia to European countries. An increasing number of research publications target these emerging invasive parasites and their potential impacts on novel honey bee hosts.

Impact factor and article impact

The most common method for evaluating journals uses bibliometric citation analysis – and its most universally used instrument is the impact factor, which is calculated and published by Clarivate (https://jcr.clarivate.com/jcr/home). The impact factor is calculated by the total number of times a journal's articles were cited during the two previous years divided by the total number of citable articles during those two years. Thus, the impact factor is a retrospective view of the quality of articles published in the previous years. Therefore, it is not possible to know the impact factor of the present year, as that will become available two years later. Still, the impact factor is a good way to monitor JAR developments (Figure 3). While a single absolute value is not meaningful alone, the best way to judge a journal based on the impact factor is noting its comparative score with regards to other journals in the same field, and also consider the respective rankings.

JAR’s 2020 impact factor was 2.584, the highest it has ever been, and it ranks 22/102 in the Entomology Science category (© InCites Journal Citation Reports®, Clarivate Analytics, 2021). Among the most cited articles are colony loss monitoring papers (e.g. Kulhanek et al., 2017, Brodschneider et al., 2018), reviews (e.g. Machado De-Melo et al., 2018), and the COLOSS BEEBOOK chapters.

Besides the actual number of citations, the impact of a specific article can also be seen by the interest it raises in terms of downloads. The most downloaded article in 2020, for example, was “Standard methods for Apis mellifera beeswax research” by Svečnjak et al. (2019), with 4,202 downloads through the Taylor and Francis (T&F) website. Another option is to look at the Altmetric Attention Score, which measures the attention an article gets from non-academic sources, like news, mainstream and social media, as well as public policy documents. The top Altmetric Scoring Article in 2020 was “Loss rates of honey bee colonies during winter 2017/18 in 36 countries participating in the COLOSS survey, including effects of forage sources” by Brodschneider et al. (2018), with an Attention Score of 786.

Figure 3. Development of the impact factor of the Journal of Apicultural Research in the last decade (2011-2020) (© InCites Journal Citation Reports®, Clarivate Analytics). Average impact factor 2011-2020: 1.733.

COLOSS BEEBOOK

In this extended editorial, the COLOSS BEEBOOK certainly deserves its own paragraph, as the chapters published have certainly contributed to the impact and success of JAR in the last decade. The COLOSS BEEBOOK project arose from discussions at meetings of the COLOSS (Prevention of Honey Bee COlony LOSSes; www.coloss.org) association, which was established in 2008 to explore all possible reasons for honey bee colony losses (Williams et al., 2012). The vision was, and still is, to develop a definitive inventory of standard techniques and methods in honey bee research to ensure that studies performed by different laboratories around the world are directly comparable to each other. A concerted effort by the editors (COLOSS), author teams, and manuscript reviewers achieved the task, and the first two volumes of the COLOSS BEEBOOK were published as Special issues 52(1) and 52(4) of JAR, and as hard copy volumes by IBRA in 2013. The CrossRef database in August 2021 shows a total of 2,300 citations to BEEBOOK chapters in scientific papers, which are accumulating at a rate of approximately 50 per month, the most highly cited papers being those on Nosema (Fries et al., 2013), Varroa (Dietemann et al., 2013) and viruses (de Miranda et al., 2013). Moreover, there have been more than 100,000 downloads of BEEBOOK chapters, including the Volume III chapters published more recently (Carreck et al., 2020). Among the most read articles is Standard methods for Apis mellifera propolis research (Bankova et al., 2019), with 20,550 views and 122 citations.

Since the BEEBOOK chapters of Standard methods of Apis mellifera research have been used worldwide by bee researchers, the BEEBOOK of Standard methods of Apis cerana research is now being prepared to serve the purpose of having standard protocols dedicated specifically for work on another important species of honey bees that has a long history of beekeeping in Asia. There will be five chapters on guidelines of A. cerana beekeeping management, A. cerana bee research, disease and pests of A. cerana, and A. cerana bee products. The book will include a chapter on bee-omics to serve the purpose of advancement of technology to work on bee research.

Where is the field moving?

We will now perform the highly speculative task of predicting where the field will move as we go into the next decade and beyond. These potential areas of development that we identify are borne out of our shared concern for our changing climate and habitat destruction, and also for the future growth of a truly worldwide research community. They fall into the three main areas of “big data”, increasing accessibility, and improved public engagement. As the reader will note, these areas of growth are not purely directed toward research topics, but are also a reflection of the public’s interest in our work and the worldwide growth of our research community.

1. “Big data”. Future work will increasingly address the impact of climate change, for instance, extreme weather patterns on bee health, through such factors as temperature, unpredictable floral phenologies, and forage availability. Growing habitat connectivity through species introductions and habitat destruction will further dissolve historical population barriers, exposing bee populations to novel biotic challenges, such as disease and competition for scarce resources. Understanding how these ecological factors influence bee health requires a combination of small-scale, “classic” field studies with large-scale computational analyses that tease apart meaningful patterns. For example, as satellite imaging further defines the abiotic and floral changes that are visible from the Earth’s orbit, standard population surveys and lab-based nutritional studies will lend insight into how these changes actually influence bee health. Large historic climate data sets will be incorporated into predictive population models that not only predict change in bee populations but the impact of different management practices. As the cost of next-generation sequencing gets even lower, advances in molecular techniques and sequencing technology will play an even more significant role in describing bee populations, the ecosystems they interact with, and disease transmission within and between populations. Thus promoting deeper genetic and epidemiological studies, as in case of recently described trypanosomatid parasite Lotmaria passim (Williams et al., 2019). The accumulation, curation, and analysis of this “big data” poses a major challenge, as it requires a vast computing capacity, but it also needs to be accessible and searchable (see below). Modern developments in artificial intelligence and other computing technologies will dramatically change the way in which future scientists gather, analyze, and illustrate their data. As these more comprehensive data sets emerge, we must endeavor to make these data useful to the worldwide scientific community.

2. Accessibility. Accessible data sets and the adoption of virtual meeting formats will further encourage collaboration between traditional centers of research and other labs and research groups across the globe, as we are evidencing during the current worldwide pandemic. This increased access is essential if we are to increase our understanding of those less well understood yet highly relevant Apis populations and subpopulations.

3. Public engagement. The world (human) population is becoming more aware and accepting of climate change, the need to preserve biodiversity, and the potential conflicts between commercial and conservation objectives. More and more, scientists need to continually disseminate information to non-scientific audiences through education and outreach activities. Not only does this foster the public’s good will, it attracts funding agencies to our research and ensures the funds to continue our research and to educate the next generation of Apis researchers.

Closing remarks

This extended editorial for this final 60th volume issue was prepared in a joint effort by the editors and editorial board members, in line with the central cover image of this volume depicting trophallaxis that represents collaboration in the honey bee society. Once more we would like to stress that JAR’s success and developments is based on the endeavour of many: the two current and the past editors and editorial board members, reviewers, authors, IBRA, COLOSS and T&F. Together, we are looking forward to giving our best for the future of JAR and the scientific bee research community, in an overall exciting and accelerated time of bee research!

We also like to take the opportunity to welcome our latest incorporation to the JAR editorial board: Dr. Otilia Bobis from the University of Agricultural Sciences and Veterinary Medicine in Cluj-Napoca, Romania, who will support the editorial board with her expertise on bee hive products.

Gratefully yours,
Senior Editor:
Maria Bouga

Assistant Editor:
Melanie Parejo

Editorial Board Members:
Adriana M. Alippi
Otilia Bobis
Robert Brodschneider
Panuwan Chantawannakul
Vanessa Corby-Harris
Bjørn Dahle
Maria Dimou
Anna Gajda
Dora Henriques
Irfan Kandemir
Robert Pickard
Juliana Rangel
Victoria Soroker
Jevrosima Stevanovic