Assessment of pesticides risk for bees: methods for PNEC measurements
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.5073/jka.2012.437.009Abstract
Background: An individual honeybee shows a complex behavioral structure. Each bee takes part in the collective behavioral set up that ensures bee colony survival and development. Contaminants are likely to have effects on individual bees’ behavior with consequences at the level of the whole colony. They also are likely to alter bees’ physiology, including lifespan, fertility or fecundity, leading to colony weakness or colony collapse.
Results: Peer-reviewed scientific literature provides a wide range of methods used for testing honeybees’ behavioral or physiological parameters. Apart from alterations that may appear during the conduction of acute or chronic toxicity tests, specific tests could be conducted to complement the risk assessment in order to evaluate the impact of sublethal doses of contaminants on bees. Such tests can be developed both in laboratory conditions or as part of the semi-field and field tests that are currently required as higher tier tests of risk assessment schemes.
Conclusion: The purpose of this work is to review some of these methods and discuss their relevance in the evaluation of pesticide active substances and/or products in view to propose their future inclusion in pesticides risk assessment to bees.
Keywords: honey bee, sublethal effects, risk assessment
Downloads
Published
Issue
Section
License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attributed 4.0 International License.
You are free to:
- Share — copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format
- Adapt — remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially
Under the following terms:
-
Attribution — You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. You may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses you or your use
- No additional restrictions — You may not apply legal terms or technological measures that legally restrict others from doing anything the license permits