Revealing the mechanics of pesticide stressors on honeybee flight via digital twinning

Research Project, 2025 – 2028

Insect pollinators, such as the European honeybee, are crucial to healthy ecologies and sustainable agriculture—but these pollinators are under threat. Population losses in wild and managed bee colonies over the last several decades have been attributed to a range of anthropic stressors, including sublethal exposure to widely-used neonicotinoid insecticides. This exposure can impair bee flight performance and endurance, debilitating bee communities, but the mechanics behind this impairment are not well understood. Drawing from techniques in spacecraft design, I propose to reveal these mechanics by developing a digital twin of the honeybee flight motor: a holistic virtual model of the muscles, exoskeletal mechanisms, and wingbeat aerodynamics that give rise to bee flight. Integrating meta-analysed data with state-of-the-art computational methods, I will be able to resolve the effects of neonicotinoids on bee flight in unprecedented detail: down to changes in force and power waveforms at timescales faster than the wingbeat, and across the spatial structure of the flight motor. In doing so, I will be able to identify the mechanisms leading to loss of flight efficiency, and test the hypothesis that exoskeletal dynamics amplify the deleterious effects of neonicotinoids. This digital twin will be a landmark synergy of applied mathematics, biomechanics, and entomology, and will open a pathway toward holistic in silico forecast methods for anthropic stressors on entomofauna.