Environmental Display Can Buffer the Effect of Pesticides on Solitary Bees

Abstract

<jats:p>Environmental quality (e.g., diversity of resource availability, nesting sites, environmental display) plays an important role in an animal’s life. While homogeneous environments can restrict organisms from developing activities such as food seeking (behavioral impairment), more complex environments allow animals to perform activities with learning and behavioral perfecting outcomes. Pesticides are known to affect the learning and foraging behaviors of bees; however, little is known about the counterbalance displayed by the environment. Herein, we conducted two experiments that simulated distinct environmental displays, in which the effects of a fungicide (IndarTM 5EW-febunconazole) on solitary bee foraging activities were tested. We found that the fungicide only impaired the activities of bees in one of the studied environments. The difference in visitation rates and flower exploitation of bees between the two different environmental displays led to changes in metrics of bee–flower networks across environments. Linkage density, a metric associated with pollination efficiency that is known to be impacted by different environments, differed across environments. Our results showed that ecological interaction network metrics can differ regarding the different environmental displays. This study indicates that environmental complexity helps balance the negative effects of pesticides on solitary bees and highlights the potential use of solitary bees as model organisms for experimental simulations of environmental change.</jats:p>

Plant a Rose Today to Conserve the World’s Most Important Solitary Bee

“…There are reports that pesticides have a negative effect on bees 3,29 . It is postulated that the solitary wild bees are worst affected than the honey bees 30,31 .…”

Combined Effects of Pesticides and Electromagnetic-Fields on Honeybees: Multi-Stress Exposure

“…The number of fungicide treatments was even higher than that of insecticides (Table 2). Despite their low TR, their sub-lethal and chronic effects are extensively demonstrated by the literature (e.g., [92,93]).…”

Bee Tracker -- an open-source machine-learning based video analysis software for the assessment of nesting and foraging performance of cavity-nesting solitary bees

“…The effect of different stressors can vary between species and depend on their functional traits such as body size, sociality or mode of nesting (Brittain & Potts, 2011;Sgolastra et al, 2019). A range of solitary bee species are therefore increasingly studied for the assessment and monitoring of stressors on pollinators (Boff et al, 2020;Ganser et al, 2020;Klaus et al, 2021;Stuligross & Williams, 2020;Zurbuchen et al, 2010).…”

“…Bombus terrestris) as indicator species (Goulson et al, 2015;Potts et al, 2016). Only relatively recently research and risk assessments increasingly consider also other bee species for the monitoring of impacts of stressors on bee pollinators, prominently including cavity-nesting solitary bee species (Boff et al, 2020;Rundlöf et al, 2015;Stuligross & Williams, 2020;Zurbuchen et al, 2010). In Europe for example, the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) has proposed to integrate two cavitynesting solitary bee species, Osmia bicornis and O. cornuta for risk assessment of plant protection products on bees, including higher-tier assessments of sub-lethal effects on reproductive success (EFSA, 2013;Franke et al, 2021).…”