Neonicotinoid Pesticide Reduces Bumble Bee Colony Growth and Queen Production

By P. Whitehorn, Stephanie O'Connor, F. Wackers, Dave Goulson. Science, 2012

1,239 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Bad News for Bees Neonicotinoid insecticides were introduced in the early 1990s and have become one of the most widely used crop pesticides in the world. These compounds act on the insect central nervous system, and they have been shown to be persistent in the environment and in plant tissues. Recently, there have been controversial connections made between neonicotinoids and pollinator deaths, but the mechanisms underlying these potential deaths have remained unknown. Whitehorn et al. (p. 351, published online 29 March) exposed developing colonies of bumble bees to low levels of the neonicotinoid imidacloprid and then released them to forage under natural conditions. Treated colonies displayed reduced colony growth and less reproductive success, and they produced significantly fewer queens to found subsequent generations. Henry et al. (p. 348, published online 29 March) documented the effects of low-dose, nonlethal intoxication of another widely used neonicotinoid, thiamethoxam, on wild foraging honey bees. Radio-frequency identification tags were used to determine navigation success of treated foragers, which suggested that their homing success was much reduced relative to untreated foragers. Bumble bee colonies produce many fewer queens after exposure to a widely used insecticide. Growing evidence for declines in bee populations has caused great concern because of the valuable ecosystem services they provide. Neonicotinoid insecticides have been implicated in these declines because they occur at trace levels in the nectar and pollen of crop plants. We exposed colonies of the bumble bee Bombus terrestris in the laboratory to field-realistic levels of the neonicotinoid imidacloprid, then allowed them to develop naturally under field conditions. Treated colonies had a significantly reduced growth rate and suffered an 85% reduction in production of new queens compared with control colonies. Given the scale of use of neonicotinoids, we suggest that they may be having a considerable negative impact on wild bumble bee populations across the developed world.

Subfields: Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics, Genetics, Insect Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/05951cd082dbebde39c56d04c13756b6ba32ea28

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Citations in the corpus

Superorganism resilience: eusociality and susceptibility of ecosystem service providing insects to stressors (2015, background): “bumble bee colonies exposed to neonicotinoids produced fewer gynes (future queens) [32,33] and that honey bee colonies replaced queens more frequently [29]; however, mechanisms responsible for these observations have not yet been identified.”
A review of the direct and indirect effects of neonicotinoids and fipronil on vertebrate wildlife (2014, background): “Probably the most notable example among the latter exposure pathway was the dramatic impact that organochlorine pesticides, especially DDT and its metabolite DDE, had on populations of birds of prey (Ratcliffe 1967; Newton 1995).”
Keeping invertebrate research ethical in a landscape of shifting public opinion (2019, background): “While there has been less uptake from the wider public on these issues from a purely ethical angle, there is increasing real public concern about the plight and decline of pollinators, with over 99,000 people signing a petitioning against neonicotinoids to the UK government (Petitions, 2015) after c”
Climatic Risk and Distribution Atlas of European Bumblebees (2015, background): “Pesticides have most likely also played a role because of their extreme toxicity for some bumblebee species (e.g. Whitehorn et al., 2012; Zarevúcka, 2013) or to the closely related species Apis mellifera (e.g. Johnson et al., 2010, 2013).”
Neonicotinoid contamination of global surface waters and associated risk to aquatic invertebrates: a review. (2015, background): “, 2008) and terrestrial pollinators such as bumble bees and honey bees (Decourtye and Devillers, 2010; SanchezBayo and Goka, 2014; Whitehorn et al., 2012).”
Mainstreaming ecosystem services into EU policy (2013, background): “Such drivers, for instance the use of pesticides [51,52] or the presence of pollinator supporting habitats in the landscape were not included in this study.”
A 1961–2010 record of fertilizer use, pesticide application and cereal yields: a review (2014, background): “For example, warming is likely to benefit irrigated agriculture but do harm to rainfed crops in China (Wang et al. 2009).”
Pesticide Residues and Bees – A Risk Assessment (2014, background): “While the viability of the bee colonies depends largely on the queen’s health and her reproductive output, at present there is insufficient knowledge to assess the impact that pesticides have on the queen’s performance – the exception being recent studies with honey bees [42] and bumble bees [43].”
The dose makes the poison: have “field realistic” rates of exposure of bees to neonicotinoid insecticides been overestimated in laboratory studies? (2014, background): “Recent laboratory based studies have demonstrated adverse sub-lethal effects of neonicotinoid insecticides on honey bees and bumble bees, and these studies have been influential in leading to a European Union moratorium on the use of three neonicotinoids, clothianidin, imidacloprid, and…”