Combined pesticide exposure severely affects individual- and colony-level traits in bees
By Richard J. Gill, O. Ramos-Rodriguez, N. E. Raine. Nature, 2012
940 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Reported widespread declines of wild and managed insect pollinators have serious consequences for global ecosystem services and agricultural production. Bees contribute approximately 80% of insect pollination, so it is important to understand and mitigate the causes of current declines in bee populations . Recent studies have implicated the role of pesticides in these declines, as exposure to these chemicals has been associated with changes in bee behaviour and reductions in colony queen production. However, the key link between changes in individual behaviour and the consequent impact at the colony level has not been shown. Social bee colonies depend on the collective performance of many individual workers. Thus, although field-level pesticide concentrations can have subtle or sublethal effects at the individual level, it is not known whether bee societies can buffer such effects or whether it results in a severe cumulative effect at the colony level. Furthermore, widespread agricultural intensification means that bees are exposed to numerous pesticides when foraging, yet the possible combinatorial effects of pesticide exposure have rarely been investigated. Here we show that chronic exposure of bumblebees to two pesticides (neonicotinoid and pyrethroid) at concentrations that could approximate field-level exposure impairs natural foraging behaviour and increases worker mortality leading to significant reductions in brood development and colony success. We found that worker foraging performance, particularly pollen collecting efficiency, was significantly reduced with observed knock-on effects for forager recruitment, worker losses and overall worker productivity. Moreover, we provide evidence that combinatorial exposure to pesticides increases the propensity of colonies to fail.
Subfields: Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics, Genetics, Insect Science
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/68fdad8b28ffe9e647da437975457a0e0aee6655
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In Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics
In Genetics
In Insect Science
Citations in the corpus
- Protecting an ecosystem service: approaches to understanding and mitigating threats to wild insect pollinators (2016, background): “…are typically limited to two (or few) factors (Baron et al., 2014; Becher et al., 2013; 361 Doublet et al., 2015; Fauser-Misslin et al., 2014; Gill et al., 2012; Gonzalez-Varo et al., 2013; 362 Hoover et al., 2012; Kennedy et al., 2013; Kleijn and van Langevelde, 2006; Oliver et al.,…”
- Biotic and Abiotic Factors Associated with Colonies Mortalities of Managed Honey Bee (Apis mellifera) (2019, background): “Bees, both wild and managed, provide about 80% of the insect pollination of flowering plants [5].”
- Pesticide Residues and Bees – A Risk Assessment (2014, background): “terrestris) and reduce brood production in their colonies more than when fed on pollen contaminated with only one insecticide [88].”
- Effects of neonicotinoids and fipronil on non-target invertebrates (2014, neutral): “Gill et al. (2012) provided B. terrestris colonies with feeders containing 10 ppb of imidacloprid in sugared water whilst simultaneously allowing bees freedom to forage outside the nest.”
- Neonicotinoid clothianidin adversely affects insect immunity and promotes replication of a viral pathogen in honey bees (2013, background): “Concurrent studies on bumblebees have provided further confirmation of the hypothesis that neonicotinoids can have a wider negative impact on pollinators (19, 20).”