High pesticide risk to honey bees despite low focal crop pollen collection during pollination of a mass blooming crop.

ABSTRACT: Honey bees provide critical pollination services for many agricultural crops. While the contribution of pesticides to current hive loss rates is debated, remarkably little is known regarding the magnitude of risk to bees and mechanisms of exposure during pollination. Here, we show that pesticide risk in recently accumulated beebread was above regulatory agency levels of concern for acute or chronic exposure at 5 and 22 of the 30 apple orchards, respectively, where we placed 120 experimental hives. Landscape context strongly predicted focal crop pollen foraging and total pesticide residues, which were dominated by fungicides. Yet focal crop pollen foraging was a poor predictor of pesticide risk, which was driven primarily by insecticides. Instead, risk was positively related to diversity of

SUBMITTER: McArt SH 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5396195 | biostudies-literature | 2017 Apr

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature