A large-scale field study finds that different bee species experience different levels of risk from pesticides, depending on how much land is farmed within their foraging range. For bumblebees and solitary bees, more seminatural habitat means less risk from pesticides, but this is not true for honeybees.
In the discussion of how to protect bees from pesticides, bees are often treated as a monolith. It is assumed that what is good for one species is good for all, and that pesticides or changes to agricultural landscapes would affect all bee species equally. This is often taken one step further, with the western honeybee (Apis mellifera) being used as a surrogate species for all bees. Yet despite this simplification there are around 2,000 species of bee in Europe1 and 20,000 worldwide2 with a dazzling diversity of niches and life histories. With this in mind, the question arises of how valid the assumption is that honeybees represent a good surrogate species. In this issue of Nature Ecology & Evolution, Knapp et al.3 investigate this question by measuring how three species of bee with differing life histories respond to different agricultural land-use intensities, and find that a species’ foraging range plays a big part in pesticide exposure risk.
Source: Ecology - nature.com
