IN YOUR ORCHARD
THE BEE BOX
A Window Into US Honey Bee Pesticide Exposure The Bee Informed Partnership team often likes to use these “Bee Box” articles in Almond Facts to communicate insights and key findings about the country’s honey bees derived from the Annual Colony Loss and Management Survey that Bee Informed Partnership (BIP) has been conducting since 2011. In this issue, I wanted to share with you results from another important survey that BIP participates in each year: The USDA APHIS-funded National Honey Bee Disease Survey. Each year, BIP Tech Team Field Specialists
assist US apiary inspectors tasked with evaluating US commercial honey bee colony health, inspecting colonies and collecting samples that are evaluated for existing and novel pests, diseases, viruses, and pesticides. Conducting these studies each year makes it possible to look out for accidental introductions of pests and diseases known to be a problem in other parts of the world. It also allows researchers to track trends in honey bee health risks geographically and over time. As part of this survey, both wax and pollen samples are collected from colonies and analyzed for 218 fungicides, herbicides, insecticides and varroacides of interest (and/ or their breakdown products). Each of these samples tells a different story: because pesticide residues build up in wax, these samples provide a longer-term record of what pesticides the colony has encountered, whereas fresh pollen samples, which the bees have recently brought into the colony from foraging trips, reflect what pesticides the bees are being exposed to at that moment in their current environment. Dr. Kirsten Traynor and her colleagues used the National Honey Bee Disease Survey pollen pesticide data to investigate trends in US honey bee pesticide exposure (Traynor et al. 2021). Specifically, the researchers wanted to examine how pesticide use has changed over time, to establish a baseline of current US honey bee pesticide exposure, and look for relationships between exposure to
A multi-colored assortment of recently collected pollen. Photo credit: Anne Marie Fauvel.
particular pesticides and/or pesticide combinations and the prevalence of other pests and diseases. To address these questions, Dr. Traynor examined pollen pesticide profiles from the 2011–2017 National Honey Bee Disease Survey, which is comprised of 1,055 apiaries representing 39 US states and Puerto Rico. In addition to the pesticide data, a subset of colonies had also been inspected for signs of disease, levels of the parasitic Varroa mite, the gut pathogen Nosema and eight viruses. Pesticide risk was evaluated in several different ways: prevalence (occurrence), diversity (no. of pesticides present in a sample), concentration, hazard quotient score (a risk score based on pesticide toxicity and concentration) and an individual pesticide risk score. Each of these measures provide different insights into the individual and combined importance and impacts of pesticides on honey bee colony health risks. While there isn’t room to discuss all their results, here are a few of their key findings.
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A L M O N D F A C T S
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