Pesticides can harm bees twice—as larvae and adults

Impacts on pollinators may be worse than thought

• 22 NOV 2021
• 6:20 PM
• BYERIK STOKSTAD

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Honey bees have a reputation for working hard, but carpenter bees and other bee species that don’t live in colonies might be even more industrious. For these so-called solitary bees, there is no dedicated worker class to help with rearing young and foraging. “Each female is kind of like a lone wolf,” says Clara Stuligross, a Ph.D. student at the University of California (UC), Davis.

Now, a study by Stuligross and colleagues tallying the detrimental impacts of a key pesticide on reproduction of a solitary bee species adds to growing evidence that such insects, which make up the vast majority of bees species, are vulnerable to the compounds just like their more social counterparts. Their finding suggest the harm of pesticides can accumulate over multiple generations, which could exacerbate the loss of species that provide valuable pollination for farms and ecosystems.

The work demonstrates that chronic pesticide poisoning can cause “meaningful and significant impacts” on bees, says Nigel Raine, a bee ecologist at the University of Guelph who was not involved with the study. “That’s really quite important.”

Of all the types of pesticides that harm bees, one is particularly insidious. Known as neonicotinoids, they are coated on seeds or sprayed on soil. Then they permeate the tissue of plants, eventually showing up in pollen and nectar. The pesticides disrupt learning and memory in honey bees and several studies have shown solitary bees suffer the same kind of damage. At higher levels, the chemicals impair reproduction, such as by reducing the viability of sperm, leading to fewer offspring. Yet little research has examined how neonicotinoids might harm pollinators throughout their life cycle.

So Stuligross and her UC Davis adviser, ecologist Neal Williams, designed a study to find out. They looked at the blue orchard bee (Osmia lignaria), a solitary species native to North America that farmers sometimes use to pollinate almond and other fruit trees.

Stuligross set up 16 cages, each about the size of two small cars, and planted three species of wildflower to feed the bees. In half of the cages, she drenched the soil with imidacloprid, as farmers do with this common neonicotinoid. The eight females bees in each cage had the company of 16 males, and they were provided with nesting space (holes drilled in wood) and a supply of mud that insects use to create cells for their brood inside the holes. Other solitary bee species do this as well, which is why they’re also called mason bees.

After the females mated, they laid eggs inside the holes, provided each egg with a ball of pollen and nectar, and sealed them up in individual cells made of mud. Meanwhile, the females were themselves consuming pesticide-contaminated pollen and nectar. They seemed sluggish and needed longer to find their holes, for example, and they laid fewer eggs than healthy bees. “They just seemed like they weren’t well,” Stuligross says.

Adult blue orchard bees typically only live for a few weeks. After they die, their larvae develop while feeding on the food left behind. This exposure to the pesticide had lasting harm. Bees that had consumed pesticides had 30% fewer offspring, compared with bees that had grown up without pesticides.

To figure out the effect of chronic exposure, Stuligross drenched the soil in some cages again the next year. Fertility suffered even more. Those insects with a double dose over the 2 years—they had consumed pesticides as larvae in the first year of the experiment and then again as adults, when they collected pesticide-laden pollen from flowers—laid about 20% fewer eggs than did bees that had only been exposed as larvae, Stuligross and Williams report today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“Clearly, this paper shows that there are substantial impacts,” Raine says.

Over two generations, the damage to bee fertility adds up: The number of offspring would be about 75% less than for bees never exposed to imidacloprid, the team concludes. Such a reduction in fertility could tip populations into a long-term decline in the real world, where uncaged bees are not protected from predators or provided with easy access to unlimited food, Stuligross says.

“This is very important because it can explain at least partly the decline of bees worldwide,” says Fabio Sgolastra, a bee ecologist at the University of Bologna. “This is another piece of the puzzle showing that neonicotinoids are bad for solitary bees.” Government regulators should start to consider the risk to solitary bees, and not just honey bees, Sgolastra and others say. Although solitary bee species have not been commercialized as much as honey bees, they provide essential—and free—pollination for many farmers.