Safeguarding crop productivity by protecting crops from pest attacks entails the wide use of plant protection products that provide a quick, easy and cheap solution. The objective of this study is to understand the effects of insecticides used in agriculture on non-target butterflies, specifically on the families Lycaenidae, Nymphalidae, Hesperiidae, and Papilionidae. To achieve this goal, a formal systematic review was performed according to European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) guidelines, by entering a combination of keywords on 3 online databases. Three reviewers independently extracted information on study characteristics and quality. The main results were collected and grouped by the insecticide used, butterflies species and family, and endpoints. The output was valuable but heterogeneous as the endpoints and methodologies of the studies reviewed were different. Few experimental studies on the effects of insecticides on the most common butterfly families have been published. Naled and permethrin are the most commonly used insecticides in the experiments, whilst the target organisms of these studies are Vanessa cardui, Danaus plexippus, Heliconius charitonius, belonging to the Nymphalidae family, and Eumaeus atala, belonging to the Lycaenidae family; the effects were evaluated on all developmental stages, with special attention to the larval phase. This systematic review highlights the need for more studies on the effects of chemical insecticides on non-target Lepidoptera in light of their ecological importance and the extensive use of these chemical products.

The European bee, Apis mellifera L. (Hymenoptera: Apidae), is a fundamental resource for the pollination of a great variety of botanical species used by humans for sustenance. Over the last few decades, bee colonies have become vulnerable to a new pest that has advanced beyond its native sub-Saharan territory: the small hive beetle, Aethina tumida Murray (Coleoptera: Nitidulidae). This currently presents a pressing problem in the United States and Australia, but it has also been recorded in Portugal and Italy and it is likely to spread in the rest of Europe too. This study represents a systematic review, based on EFSA guidelines, of the various control treatments for small hive beetles in order to identify the most effective methods as well as, those with no effects on bee colonies. The results show that the bulk of these studies were performed in the United States and that a number of treatments are suitable for the control of A. tumida, though some have negative effects on bees while others have low effectiveness or are ineffective. The best results are those with the entomopathogenic nematodes of the genus Steinernema and Heterorhabditis, but also with formic acid or diatomaceous earth. Various products containing insecticides have been effective, for example, Perizin (Bayer), GardStar (Y-Tex), CheckMite+ strips (Bayer), but Apithor (Apithor ) cannot be used in Europe because it contains Fipronil, which has been banned since 2013. Some common products like bleach and detergent have also been effective.