Abstract
Honey bees are key agricultural pollinators, but beekeepers continually suffer high annual colony losses owing to a number of environmental stressors, including inadequate nutrition, pressures from parasites and pathogens, and exposure to a wide variety of pesticides. In this review, we examine how two such stressors, pesticides and viruses, may interact in additive or synergistic ways to affect honey bee health. Despite what appears to be a straightforward comparison, there is a dearth of studies examining this issue likely owing to the complexity of such interactions. Such complexities include the wide array of pesticide chemical classes with different modes of actions, the coupling of many bee viruses with ectoparasitic Varroa mites, and the intricate social structure of honey bee colonies. Together, these issues pose a challenge to researchers examining the effects pesticide-virus interactions at both the individual and colony level.
Highlights
Honey bees (Apis mellifera) are perhaps the most important insect for human well-being, helping to pollinate over $200 billion USD in agricultural crops per year [1]
We focus on the interaction between two stressors that has far received surprisingly little attention: that of pesticides and viruses
Organophosphates and carbamates have been linked to many bee poisoning incidents in the UK [45]. Pyrethroids are another popular class of insecticides and are similar to the natural pyrethrin compounds produced in chrysanthemum plants
Summary
Honey bees (Apis mellifera) are perhaps the most important insect for human well-being, helping to pollinate over $200 billion USD in agricultural crops per year [1]. Honey bees often encounter many different chemicals simultaneously [20,21,22,23] owing to their ubiquity in commercial pollination, their generalist foraging strategy, and their large foraging ranges that can cover hundreds of square kilometers [24] These different chemicals, along with adjuvants and other additives in the applied formulations, can interact with one another to produce additive or sometimes synergistic effects in bees and other insects [12,25,26]. We briefly outline some of these chemical classes commonly encountered by bees, the sublethal effects they exert on bees, as well as the modes of actions of these chemicals in bees or other more common insect models, such as fruit flies and mosquitos
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