Transfer of the Active Ingredients of Some Plant Protection Products from Raspberry Plants to Beehives

Bartosz Piechowicz,Przemysław Grodzicki,Ewa Szpyrka,Magdalena Podbielska,Lech Zaręba

doi:10.1007/s00244-017-0488-4

Abstract

Plant protection products (PPPs) have been found increasingly in the environment. They pose a huge threat to bees, contributing to honeybee colony losses and consequently to enormous economic losses. Therefore, this field investigation was designed to determine whether their active ingredients (AIs) were transferred from raspberry plants to beehives located in the immediate neighbourhood of the crop and to what extent they were transferred. Every week for 2 months, samples of soil, raspberry leaves, flowers and fruits, worker bees, honeybee brood, and honey were collected and analysed for the presence of propyzamide, chlorpyrifos, iprodione, pyraclostrobin, boscalid, cypermethrin, difenoconazole, azoxystrobin, and pyrimethanil residues. Five of these substances were found in the worker bee bodies. Chlorpyrifos, applied to only the soil through the irrigation system, also was detected in the brood. A small amount of boscalid was noted in the honey, but its residues did not exceed the maximum residue level. For chlorpyrifos, boscalid, and pyrimethanil, a positive correlation between the occurrence of PPPs in the crops and the beehives was found. Statistical methods confirmed that the application of PPPs on a raspberry plantation, as an example of nectar-secreting plants, was linked to the transfer of their AIs to beehives.

Highlights

The honeybee (Apis mellifera F.) is an insect species of significant importance to the biosphere and the economy (Free 1993; Delaplane and Mayer 2000)
Studies of Piechowicz et al (2018a, b) on the transfer of plant protection products from oilseed rape crops and orchards to beehives showed a presence of pesticides both in bee bodies (5/7 detected compounds at rape plantation 1; 3/5 at rape plantation 2; and 5/6 active ingredients (AIs) in orchards) and in honeybee brood (4 and 2 AIs in hives located near rape crops and 6 AIs in bees in the orchard), and in honey (3 and 3 AIs in rape honey and 4 AIs in apple-pear honey)
Pesticide residue recoveries should be in the range of 70–120% of the substance introduced into the sample, and the repeatability should be ≤ 20% (Document SANTE 2015)

Summary

Introduction

The honeybee (Apis mellifera F.) is an insect species of significant importance to the biosphere and the economy (Free 1993; Delaplane and Mayer 2000). Some investigators indicate that for bees endowed with only 46 genes responsible for the detoxification system functioning (Claudianos et al 2006), which have few genes controlling detoxification of the plant protection products (The honeybee genome sequencing consortium 2006), a synergistic action of small, sublethal residues of two or more AIs (Thompson 1996; Thompson and Wilkins 2003; Mullin et al 2010; Glavan and Božič 2013; Johnson et al 2013) can be dangerous for them Even if these compounds are not toxic to bees, this does not mean that they are not harmful to the brood (Zhu et al 2014). Our study was an initial analysis of whether some AIs of PPPs may be carried by bees from raspberry plants and transferred to beehives located in the immediate vicinity of the crop and to what extent these AIs were transferred

Methods

Results

Conclusion