Development and Assessment Of An Epidemiologic Dashboard for Surveillance of Varroa Destructor in Ontario Apiaries

Varroosis (caused by the Varroa destructor mite) is the most prominent health issue in beekeeping. Because these mites can exist in reservoirs of feral honey bee colonies, eradication is impossible. Therefore, integrated pest management strategies are critical in controlling their populations, for which adequate regional surveillance is necessary. This work aims to build on the success of epidemiological data dashboards developed throughout the 2019-coronavirus pandemic and showcase how this technology can improve surveillance of Varroa mite infestations. Dashboards provide a consistent source of information and epidemiologic metrics through data visualizations, and mobilize data otherwise bound to tables and intermittent reports. An interactive dashboard for the surveillance of Varroa mite infestations is presented. Through interactive figures and plots, able to be disaggregated to a specific region and time frame, this dashboard allows for members of the beekeeping community to monitor nearby mite observations continuously throughout the season. To assess the quality of the developed dashboard, seven criteria found to be common across highly actionable COVID-19 dashboards were used by means of a survey of beekeepers. Furthermore, future directions for surveillance dashboards are discussed, including their integration with citizen science data collection, to develop a comprehensive province-wide surveillance system. The outcome of this project is a functional dashboard for population-level monitoring of Varroa mites and a model for the design and assessment of future dashboards for other species, and diseases.