Publication Details

Category Text Publication
Reference Category Journals
DOI 10.1002/etc.5420
Licence creative commons licence
Title (Primary) Chronic and acute effects of imidacloprid on a simulated BEEHAVE honeybee colony
Author Reiner, D.; Spangenberg, M.C.; Grimm, V.; Groeneveld, J.; Wiegand, K.
Source Titel Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry
Year 2022
Department OESA
Volume 41
Issue 9
Page From 2318
Page To 2327
Language englisch
Topic T5 Future Landscapes
Data and Software links https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.6567312
Supplements https://setac.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/action/downloadSupplement?doi=10.1002%2Fetc.5420&file=etc5420-sup-0001-ODD.pdf
https://setac.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/action/downloadSupplement?doi=10.1002%2Fetc.5420&file=etc5420-sup-0002-appendix.pdf
Keywords pesticide risk assessment; ecotoxicology; insecticide
Abstract Honeybees (Apis melliera) are important pollinators for wild plants as well as for crops, but honeybee performance is threatened by several stressors including varroa mites, gaps in foraging supply and pesticides. The consequences of bee colony long-time exposure to multiple stressors are not well understood. The vast number of possible stressor combinations and necessary study duration require research comprising field-, laboratory- and simulation experiments. We simulated long-term exposure of a honeybee colony to the insecticide imidacloprid and to varroa mites carrying the deformed wing virus, in landscapes with different temporal gaps in resource availability as single stressors and in combinations. Furthermore, we put a strong emphasis on chronic lethal, acute sublethal and acute lethal effects of imidacloprid on honeybees. We have chosen conservative published values to parameterize our model (e.g. highest reported imidacloprid contamination). As expected, combinations of stressors had a stronger negative effect on bee performance than each single stressor alone, and effect sizes were larger after three years of exposure than after the first year. Imidacloprid-caused reduction in bee performance was almost exclusively due to chronic lethal effects, because the thresholds for acute effects were rarely met in simulations. Additionally, honeybee colony extinctions were observed by the last day of the first year, but more pronounced on the last days of the second and third simulation year. In conclusion, our study highlights the need for more long-term studies on chronic lethal effects of pesticides on honeybees.
Persistent UFZ Identifier https://www.ufz.de/index.php?en=20939&ufzPublicationIdentifier=26357
Reiner, D., Spangenberg, M.C., Grimm, V., Groeneveld, J., Wiegand, K. (2022):
Chronic and acute effects of imidacloprid on a simulated BEEHAVE honeybee colony
Environ. Toxicol. Chem. 41 (9), 2318 - 2327 10.1002/etc.5420