A simplified view of landscape exposure and resulting pesticide risk to bees (IMAGE)
Caption
Pesticide use creates potential hazard for non-target organisms. For bees in agricultural landscapes, pesticide risk results when their activity exposes them to this hazard (top left panel). Without the co-occurrence of hazard and exposure we expect no risk (remaining panels). Of course, the degree of hazard and exposure will depend on pesticide properties (e.g., toxicity, environmental fate, product formulations, use patterns) and bee traits (e.g., foraging range, sociality, body size, detoxification pathways). Moreover, real-world exposure occurs at landscape scales (see insets), because bees can integrate multiple sources of exposure by visiting spatially separated patches that vary in the identity, amount, timing and toxicity of hazard. We use the colony pollen stores collected by bumble bees (Bombus terrestris) to quantify pesticide risk resulting from this landscape exposure. We quantify exposure as the concentrations (µg/kg) of 267 substances in the pollen while hazard is quantified by the substances’ toxicities (LD50s). Scaling concentrations by toxicities and summing these toxicity-weighted concentrations provides a relative measure of pesticide risk to bees.
Credit
Nicholson, C.C., Knapp, J., Kiljanek, T. et al. Pesticide use negatively affects bumble bees across European landscapes. Nature (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-023-06773-3
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License
CC BY