Neonicotinoid exposure disrupts bumblebee nest behavior, social networks, and thermoregulation

Crall, James D.; Switzer, Callin M.; Oppenheimer, Robert L.; Versypt, Ashlee N. Ford; Dey, Biswadip; Brown, Andrea N.; Eyster, Mackay; Guérin, Claire; Pierce, Naomi E.; Combes, Stacey A.; Bivort, Benjamin L. de

doi:10.1126/science.aat1598

Cited by 202 publications

(176 citation statements)

References 51 publications

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“…Bumblebee colony level exposure to imidacloprid also leads to a higher number of workers going out to forage (Gill et al, 2012), a pattern that could be an adaptive response to filling a foraging deficit, but could also be maladaptive hyperactive behavior. Interestingly, Crall et al (2018) found that while chronic exposure to imidacloprid increased movement speed in nest bumblebee workers, it actually decreased the amount of time workers were active, showing similar patterns of effects to our own findings. Similarly, when investigating neonicotinoid effects on nonflight thermogenesis in bumblebees, Potts et al (2018) reported that the dose-response relationship for dietary imidacloprid exposure exhibited a biphasic hormesis, whereby low-dose stimulated warming rates and a high dose led to inhibition.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 88%

Pesticide exposure affects flight dynamics and reduces flight endurance in bumblebees

Kenna

Cooley

Pretelli

et al. 2019

Ecology and Evolution

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The emergence of agricultural land use change creates a number of challenges that insect pollinators, such as eusocial bees, must overcome. Resultant fragmentation and loss of suitable foraging habitats, combined with pesticide exposure, may increase demands on foraging, specifically the ability to collect or reach sufficient resources under such stress. Understanding effects that pesticides have on flight performance is therefore vital if we are to assess colony success in these changing landscapes. Neonicotinoids are one of the most widely used classes of pesticide across the globe, and exposure to bees has been associated with reduced foraging efficiency and homing ability. One explanation for these effects could be that elements of flight are being affected, but apart from a couple of studies on the honeybee (Apis mellifera), this has scarcely been tested. Here, we used flight mills to investigate how exposure to a field realistic (10 ppb) acute dose of imidacloprid affected flight performance of a wild insect pollinator—the bumblebee, Bombus terrestris audax. Intriguingly, observations showed exposed workers flew at a significantly higher velocity over the first ¾ km of flight. This apparent hyperactivity, however, may have a cost because exposed workers showed reduced flight distance and duration to around a third of what control workers were capable of achieving. Given that bumblebees are central place foragers, impairment to flight endurance could translate to a decline in potential forage area, decreasing the abundance, diversity, and nutritional quality of available food, while potentially diminishing pollination service capabilities.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 88%

Pesticide exposure affects flight dynamics and reduces flight endurance in bumblebees

Kenna

Cooley

Pretelli

et al. 2019

Ecology and Evolution

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“…Colony-wide, high-resolution tracking augments larger-scale measures such as weight 55 and can be combined with additional hive sensors for a novel surveillance system 56 . The automatic nature of our approach also facilitates the imaging of multiple hives 57 , an important consideration due to colony-to-colony variability.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Markerless tracking of an entire insect colony

Bożek

Hebert

Portugal

et al. 2020

Preprint

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We present a comprehensive, computational method for tracking an entire colony of the honey bee Apis mellifera using high-resolution video on a natural honeycomb background. We adapt a convolutional neural network (CNN) segmentation architecture to automatically identify bee and brood cell positions, body orientations and within-cell states. We achieve high accuracy (~10% body width error in position, ~10° error in orientation, and true positive rate > 90%) and demonstrate months-long monitoring of sociometric colony fluctuations. We combine extracted positions with rich visual features of organismcentered images to track individuals over time and through challenging occluding events, recovering ~79% of bee trajectories from five observation hives over a span of 5 minutes. The resulting trajectories reveal important behaviors, including fast motion, comb-cell activity, and waggle dances. Our results provide new opportunities for the quantitative study of collective bee behavior and for advancing tracking techniques of crowded systems.

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“…Pupae thermoregulation appears to be functionally significant in honeybees because even a slight deviation from optimal temperature impairs pupal development and the performance of the emerging adults (Groh et al 2004;Tautz et al 2003). In bumblebee colonies, the brood temperature is typically kept at 28-32°C throughout the day (Crall et al 2018;Vogt 1986). The strong effect of pupae on sleep, together with the indications that incubation is increased at night in bumblebees at the expanse of sleep, suggest that brood incubation is one of the factors that drive nurses to reduce their sleep.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Signals from the brood modulate the sleep of brood tending bumblebee workers

Nagari

Jönsson

et al. 2018

Preprint

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Sleep is ubiquitous in vertebrates and invertebrates, and its chronic lost is typically associated with reduced performance, health, or survival. Nevertheless, some animals can give up sleep in order to increase survival or mating opportunities. We studied the interplay between sleep and brood care in the social bumblebee Bombus terrestris. We first used video recording and detailed behavioral analyses to confirm that the bumblebee shows the essential behavioral characteristics of sleep. Based on these analyses we next used immobility bouts of >5' as proxy for sleep in automatic activity monitoring records, and found that sleep is severely reduced in the presence of larvae that require feeding or pupae that are not fed. Reduced sleep was correlated with wax pot building, which is a behavior typical to nest founding mother queens. Sleep was also reduced in the presence of empty cocoons, but this effect was transient and reduced with time. This observation that is consistent with the presence of a sleep modulating pheromonal signal. These results provide the first evidence for brood modulation of sleep in an insect, and are consistent with the hypothesis that plasticity in sleep can evolve as a mechanism to improve care for dependent juveniles.

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Neonicotinoid exposure disrupts bumblebee nest behavior, social networks, and thermoregulation

Cited by 202 publications

References 51 publications

Pesticide exposure affects flight dynamics and reduces flight endurance in bumblebees

Pesticide exposure affects flight dynamics and reduces flight endurance in bumblebees

Markerless tracking of an entire insect colony

Signals from the brood modulate the sleep of brood tending bumblebee workers

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