Evaluation of a standard artificial flower design to feed individual bees known amounts of pesticides

Ladurner, E.; Bosch, Jordi; Kemp, William P.; Maini, S.

doi:10.1051/apido:2005025

Cited by 10 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 41 publications

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“…Using the mortality and consumption data obtained within the exposure period, the relative daily consumption (i.e., the weight of consumed sucrose-solution per weight unit of the animal per day (g × g −1 × day −1 ) of each bee was determined. Due to the known difficulties in feeding individual solitary bees under laboratory cage conditions [ 33 , 50 ] we opted for a conservative approach of excluding bees that may have died due to starvation. Therefore, we calculated the average relative daily consumption of sucrose-solution for the control bees and set the minimum consumption threshold at their lower 5th percentile.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Positive Correlation between Pesticide Consumption and Longevity in Solitary Bees: Are We Overlooking Fitness Trade-Offs?

Strobl

Camenzind

Minnameyer

et al. 2020

Insects

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The ubiquitous use of pesticides is one major driver for the current loss of biodiversity, and the common practice of simultaneously applying multiple agrochemicals may further contribute. Insect toxicology currently has a strong focus on survival to determine the potential hazards of a chemical routinely used in risk evaluations. However, studies revealing no effect on survival or even indicating enhanced survival are likely to be misleading, if potential trade-offs between survival and other physiological factors are overlooked. Here, we used standard laboratory experiments to investigate the sublethal (i.e., food consumption) and lethal (i.e., survival) effects of two common agricultural pesticides (Roundup® and clothianidin) on adult female solitary bees, Osmia bicornis. The data showed no significant effect of the treatment on cumulative survival; however, a significant positive correlation between herbicide and insecticide exposure and age was revealed, i.e., bees exposed to higher dosages lived longer. As no significant differences in daily food consumption were observed across treatment groups, increased food intake can be excluded as a factor leading to the prolonged survival. While this study does not provide data on fitness effects, two previous studies using solitary bees observed significant negative effects of neonicotinoid insecticides on fitness, yet not on survival. Thus, we conjecture that the observed non-significant effects on longevity may result from a trade-off between survival and reproduction. The data suggest that a focus on survival can lead to false-negative results and it appears inevitable to include fitness or at least tokens of fitness at the earliest stage in future risk assessments.

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Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Positive Correlation between Pesticide Consumption and Longevity in Solitary Bees: Are We Overlooking Fitness Trade-Offs?

Strobl

Camenzind

Minnameyer

et al. 2020

Insects

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“…For bumble bees we used workers, males and gynes (i.e., unmated queens), hereby referred to as queens, whereas for O. bicornis we used males and females. Bumble bee experiments were designed following OECD protocols 30 , 31 , while O. bicornis was tested following published 76 and ring-tested protocols 32 , as an OECD protocol for this latter species is not yet available.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Intra-specific variation in sensitivity of Bombus terrestris and Osmia bicornis to three pesticides

Linguadoca

Jürison²,

Hellström³

et al. 2022

Sci Rep

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There is growing evidence that pesticides may be among the causes of worldwide bee declines, which has resulted in repeated calls for their increased scrutiny in regulatory assessments. One recurring concern is that the current frameworks may be biased towards assessing risks to the honey bee. This paradigm requires extrapolating toxicity information across bee species. Most research effort has therefore focused on quantifying differences in sensitivity across species. However, our understanding of how responses to pesticides may vary within a species is still very poor. Here we take the first steps towards filling this knowledge gap by comparing acute, lethal hazards in sexes and castes of the eusocial bee Bombus terrestris and in sexes of the solitary bee Osmia bicornis after oral and contact exposure to the pesticides sulfoxaflor, Amistar (azoxystrobin) and glyphosate. We show that sensitivity towards pesticides varies significantly both within and across species. Bee weight was a meaningful predictor of pesticide susceptibility. However, weight could not fully explain the observed differences, which suggests the existence of unexplored mechanisms regulating pesticide sensitivity across bee sexes and castes. Our data show that intra-specific responses are an overlooked yet important aspect of the risk assessment of pesticides in bees.

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“…The attraction of social bees (e.g. Apis mellifera and Tetragonula carbonaria ) to our artificial flowers is particularly encouraging as bees usually require pre‐training in order to recognise artificial flowers as food sources (Ladurner et al., 2005; Rivest et al., 2017). We suggest that artificial flowers offer a replicable, controllable and scalable way to study decision making by wild flower‐visiting insects.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Artificial flowers as a tool for investigating multimodal flower choice in wild insects

Chapman,

Richardson,

Forster

et al. 2023

Ecology and Evolution

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Flowers come in a variety of colours, shapes, sizes and odours. Flowers also differ in the quality and quantity of nutritional reward they provide to entice potential pollinators to visit. Given this diversity, generalist flower‐visiting insects face the considerable challenge of deciding which flowers to feed on and which to ignore. Working with real flowers poses logistical challenges due to correlations between flower traits, maintenance costs and uncontrolled variables. Here, we overcome this challenge by designing multimodal artificial flowers that varied in visual, olfactory and reward attributes. We used artificial flowers to investigate the impact of seven floral attributes (three visual cues, two olfactory cues and two rewarding attributes) on flower visitation and species richness. We investigated how flower attributes influenced two phases of the decision‐making process: the decision to land on a flower, and the decision to feed on a flower. Artificial flowers attracted 890 individual insects representing 15 morphospecies spanning seven arthropod orders. Honeybees were the most common visitors accounting for 46% of visitors. Higher visitation rates were driven by the presence of nectar, the presence of linalool, flower shape and flower colour and was negatively impacted by the presence of citral. Species richness was driven by the presence of nectar, the presence of linalool and flower colour. For hymenopterans, the probability of landing on the artificial flowers was influenced by the presence of nectar or pollen, shape and the presence of citral and/or linalool. The probability of feeding increased when flowers contained nectar. For dipterans, the probability of landing on artificial flowers increased when the flower was yellow and contained linalool. The probability of feeding increased when flowers contained pollen, nectar and linalool. Our results demonstrate the multi‐attribute nature of flower preferences and highlight the usefulness of artificial flowers as tools for studying flower visitation in wild insects.

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Evaluation of a standard artificial flower design to feed individual bees known amounts of pesticides

Cited by 10 publications

References 41 publications

Positive Correlation between Pesticide Consumption and Longevity in Solitary Bees: Are We Overlooking Fitness Trade-Offs?

Positive Correlation between Pesticide Consumption and Longevity in Solitary Bees: Are We Overlooking Fitness Trade-Offs?

Intra-specific variation in sensitivity of Bombus terrestris and Osmia bicornis to three pesticides

Artificial flowers as a tool for investigating multimodal flower choice in wild insects

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