Beekeepers have been concerned about the hazard of pesticides to honey bees since at least the late 1800's.  With the advent of probit analysis in the 1930's researchers could begin to quantify the acute toxicity of pesticides to bees.  In the 1960's and 1970's, as many new pesticide chemistries were being developed, the acute hazard to adult bees could be predicted and incorporated into pesticide label guidelines with the intention of protecting honey bees from 'bee kills'.  While the LD50 continues to be a useful measure of pesticide toxicity to individual adult bees, there has been a growing realization that decisions based on this statistic alone do not consider the effects that exposure to a pesticide may have on the hive as a whole. Some pesticides may have a greater effect on immature bees than on adults. Pesticides may have different effects on the reproductive castes in a bee colony � the queen and drones � and the colony's long-term ability to sustain egg production.  Pesticide exposure may affect the performance of bees in a way that is not acutely lethal, but which may reduce a bees' lifespan, affect its ability to do useful work, or increase its susceptibility to pests and pathogens.  It might seem obvious that the simplest approach to all of these new questions would be to perform field tests of pesticides on whole bee colonies, but the complexities of bee biology and the challenges of beekeeping conspire to make field tests far from simple.  Instead what is needed is a whole-colony modeling approach to help interpret the results of truly simple lab-based studies in the context of the dynamic hive environment.

Determining the hazard of pesticides to honey bees: New and established methods

248th National Meeting (2014)

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