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Bumble bee workers face decreased efficiency of pollen collection and reduction in size due to Sulfoxaflor exposure in late European summer

Posted on July 24, 2022October 24, 2022

Bumble bees (Bombus terrestris) are important pollinators of wild and crop plants. Despite their importance in the process of fruit and seed production on crop sites, their activity may be impaired due to exposure to pesticides. This species has a yearly life cycle and colony success may rely on effective foraging of workers on ruderal plants late in summer when most crops are no longer flowering. In the current study, we investigated the effect of chronic exposure to Sulfoxaflor on aspects of the foraging behavior of bumble bees and whether Sulfoxaflor influences the body size of workers of B. terrestris in a crop landscape. We found that 2 weeks of continuous exposure to Sulfoxaflor influenced workers’ foraging dynamics and collection of resources. However, there was no evidence that the 5 ppb dose of the pesticide impacted the ability of bees to handle flowers with different traits. Workers from colonies exposed to Sulfoxaflor were smaller. The effect on worker size may be explained as a consequence of the reduced pollen income per unit of worker foraging. Thus, if the effects of Sulfoxaflor applied directly to crops had the same effect as that observed on commercial bumble bees after our chronic exposure, it might negatively impact colony success due to the impact on pollen collection and the reduction in the size of workers.

Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution

https://doi.org/10.3389/fevo.2022.842563

Samuel Boff, Alexander Keller, Josué Raizer, Daniela Lupi

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CiyaTheFox
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alinecmar Aline C. Martins @alinecmar ·
2 Sep

Happy to share our paper on stingless bees foraging behavior on the Cerrado biodiversity hotspot!
Read and spread! 🐝🌼
With Carol Proença Fernanda Carvalho @TNCVasconcelos @ajcaguiar @CiyaTheFox
And other amazing students and colleagues

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biorxivpreprint bioRxiv @biorxivpreprint ·
23 Jun

Opportunistic bacteria of grapevine crown galls are equipped with the genomic repertoire for opine utilization https://biorxiv.org/cgi/content/short/2023.06.20.545721v1 #bioRxiv

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ciyathefox Alexander Keller @ciyathefox ·
15 Jun

Semi-automated curation and manual addition of sequences to build reliable and extensive reference databases for ITS2 vascular plant DNA (meta-)barcoding

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alinecmar Aline C. Martins @alinecmar ·
8 Jun

New preprint

Contrasting patterns of foraging behavior in Neotropical stingless bees using pollen and honey metabarcoding

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geobiodiversity Senckenberg Research @geobiodiversity ·
30 May

#Invasive alien species not only colonize foreign regions, but they can also carry #invasive #microbiomes on their skin and in their gut. This may pose an undiscovered threat to native ecosystems, according to a recent study. 👉http://sgn.one/m8z
#SenckenbergScience

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