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Moving beyond honeybee-centric pesticide risk assessments to protect all pollinators

Nature Ecology & Evolution volume 3, pages 1373–1375 (2019)Cite this article

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Currently honeybees are the sole model insect pollinator for regulatory pesticide risk assessments globally. Here we question whether this surrogacy approach provides adequate protection against potential non-target impacts of pesticide exposure for the wide diversity of insect pollinators on which agricultural production and wild plant ecosystems depend.

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Fig. 1: Predicted minimum detectable effect size relating to reduction in honeybee colony size in a range of field studies in which colonies were exposed to plants grown from neonicotinoid-treated seed.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by an Ontario Ministry of Environment and Climate Change (MOECC) Best in Science grant (BIS201617-06), a Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) Discovery grant (2015-06783), and the Food from Thought: Agricultural Systems for a Healthy Planet Initiative, by the Canada First Research Excellent Fund (grant 000054). N.E.R. is supported as the Rebanks Family Chair in Pollinator Conservation by The W. Garfield Weston Foundation.

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Author notes

  1. Elizabeth L. Franklin

    Present address: Cornwall College, Newquay, UK

Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Environmental Sciences, University of Guelph, Guelph, Ontario, Canada

    Elizabeth L. Franklin & Nigel E. Raine

Authors
  1. Elizabeth L. Franklin
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  2. Nigel E. Raine
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Contributions

E.L.F. and N.E.R. conceived and designed the study, analysed the data and wrote the paper.

Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Elizabeth L. Franklin or Nigel E. Raine.

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The authors declare no competing interests.

Supplementary information

Supplementary Information

Effect size formula. File includes derivation of the effect size formula used to calculate estimated percentage minimum detectable effect size, and a figure outlining the relationship between the number of replicate pairs (control versus insecticide treatment sites) and detectable percentage losses in honeybee colony size with different levels of replication within site (Supplementary Fig. 1).

Supplementary Data

Effect size calculations. Spreadsheet reporting the (a) effect size formula, (b) effect size calculations, (c) inter-site and inter-colony variance calculations for Bayer Science 2014d Report M-501261-01, and (d) the relationship between detectable effect size and the number of paired sites and number of honeybee colonies at each site (Supplementary Fig. 1). Effect size calculations (b) detail the number of paired (control versus insecticide treatment) sites (pairs), the number of honeybee colonies (replicates) per site and the calculated minimum detectable effect size for each study.

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Franklin, E.L., Raine, N.E. Moving beyond honeybee-centric pesticide risk assessments to protect all pollinators. Nat Ecol Evol 3, 1373–1375 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-019-0987-y

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