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Managing on the Margins: The confluence of Modern Agriculture and Apiculture
Z. Browning, Brownings Honey Co., Inc.
In the USA, beekeeping is a hobby, a sideline business, and commercial enterprise. Pollinating our backyard gardens, and local communities is made possible by backyard beekeepers with one hive or more. Beekeepers who aspire to increase their honey production, and crop pollination may have hundreds of hives serving not just their local communities, but their state or regions of the country renting their hives to pollinate specialty crops. Commercial beekeepers migrate with their tens of thousands of colonies to pollinate the nation’s food supply. Once commercial bees have pollinated the majority of specialty crops they head to summer forage areas for a honey crop. The areas of conflict for bees in agriculture encompasses the urban backyard garden to the almond orchards of California. Pest and pathogens of honey bees are real challenges regardless of location. Habitat loss and pesticide exposure to bees, are greater variables, but no matter what general shared land use is considered for bee hives there are potential conflicts. In each and every case, there are also opportunities to work together with partners and stakeholders for mutually beneficial outcomes. Whether it is water issues, soil erosion and land use issues, or human health concerns with insect bourne diseases, pesticide manufacturers must address how the end user interprets the directions for use, and the cultural practices of the products. Regulatory agencies must acknowledge the pesticide end user’s cultural practices of tank mixing pesticides, of fungicide and herbicide impacts upon pollinators, and to combine their agency efforts to protect the entire farm, not just each single crop from each single pest. Sustainable land management whether for food production or protection of human and animal health from disease vectors must be coordinated to ensure profitable production outputs for all stakeholders. Beekeepers can assist in the development of
scientifically supported risk assessment through participation in research development. Beekeepers know bees; researchers know research protocols. To understand how honey bees function under migratory beekeeping and crop field conditions beekeepers need to be part of designing the risk assessment research. Beekeepers, no matter the level of beekeeping or number of hives, are eager to be included in research that will help alleviate the risks to honey bees, and native pollinators. Involving beekeepers in risk assessment and research design is key to ensuring the research premise and results truly reflect the real-world of beekeepers and honey bees. In some ideal world beekeepers would be respected for the ecosystem service their honey bees provide to farmers. Beekeeper and farmer would understand their symbiosis in connection with the health of the crop, and the success of the crop’s yield. Both would work to ensure a healthy crop and healthy honey bees to pollinate all crops. One begets the other; each supporting each other: beekeeper and farmer, honey bee and crop (personal examples). As such all stakeholders who rely on honey bees and native pollinators to maintain a healthy ecosystem would balance competing interests to ensure pollinators have clean, plentiful, and diverse forage, pollinators are healthy to provide appropriate pollination services to the ecosystem, and land management is facilitated to reduce soil erosion, protect water, and reduce the threat of disease vectors. (share Bee and Butterfly Fund programs an results)
327
A new multi-dimensional method for evidence synthesis and weighting in bee risk assessment
A. Ippolito, R. Sharp, C. Szentes, D. Auteri, EFSA - European Food Safety Authority / Pesticides Unit
In recent years, neonicotinoids substances have often been in the spotlight, particularly due to their effects on bees. Reporting of highly contradictory results catalysed much attention from the scientific community. The great amount of available studies requests approaches able to ensure an effective integration of the available data. To these purpose, EFSA has developed a novel approach for the most recent conclusions on imidacloprid, clothianidin, and thiamethoxam. Risk due to exposure of bees from residues in pollen and nectar of treated crops is used here as a case study to illustrate the methodology. Oral exposure was estimated by combining data on residue levels in pollen and nectar and estimation of bee food consumption. Together with exposure data, higher tier effect data were the core of the weight of evidence exercise. Each endpoint was identified by four dimensions: (I) the magnitude of the observed deviation from the control, (II) the reliability, (III) the level of exposure in the experiment, and (IV) the length of the exposure. In order to visually illustrate these four dimensions of the endpoints and in order to help the interpretation of each ‘line of evidence’, a tailored graphical representation was developed. The relevance of each line of evidence was established a priori, based on the relationship with the specific protection goals (SPGs). Integration of the lines of evidence followed a stepwise procedure, giving priority to the higher classes of relevance. Single risk assessment results are beyond the scope of this platform, which aims at communicating the features of this new approach. This was, to our knowledge, the first systematic assessment on such a large body of evidence for this specific topic. The exercise combined systematic reviews and weight or evidence, sharing many aspects with meta-analysis techniques. The approach used in this assessment addressed some issues that commonly undermine the reliability of meta-analysis such as the so-called ‘file-drawer’ problem. Overall, the presented approach ensured significantly more transparency than a fully qualitative expert judgment-driven assessment, but still allowed considering several dimensions in a quali-quantitative way, without oversimplifying the assessment by using fully quantitative measurements that, at present stage, are hardly capable of retaining important qualitative information.
328
PESTICIDE EXPOSURE ASSESSMENT PARADIGM FOR BUMBLE BEES
J. van der Steen, Alveus AB Consultancy; C. Cutler, Dalhousie University / Faculty of Agriculture; D. Goulson, School of Life Sciences, University of Sussex; A. Gradish, University of Guelph / School of Environmental Sciences; O. Klein, Eurofins Agroscience Services Ecotox GmbH / Ecotox Field; D. Lehmann, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency / ORD NHEERL; J. Lueckmann, Rifcon GmbH; B. O'Neill, DuPont Crop Protection; N.E. Raine, C. Scott-Dupree, University of Guelph / School of Environmental Sciences; B. Sharma, FMC Corp/ Global Regulatory Sciences / Global Regulatory Sciences; H. Thompson, Syngenta Ltd / Environmental Safety
Entomopollination is an important biological and economic factor for a number of crops in agriculture. Crop protection is an integral part of agriculture and the use of pesticides, particularly insecticides, is a potential area of conflict between economics and biology. For decades pollinator decisions in registration and re-evaluation of pesticides have been based almost exclusively on first- and higher-tier honey bee toxicity tests This approach has been challenged and regulatory agencies in the EU and USA have started to review this process in respect of non-Apis bees. In this paper we focus on bumble bees (Bombus spp.). The potential exposure routes and actual exposure of the bumble bee queen, workers and larvae are mapped and knowledge gaps are identified. The honey bee is used as the reference point to which the differences in biology, foraging and nursing
are compared. Some significant differences in susceptibility to pesticides between
Bombus species have also been identified. It is concluded that there are significant
gaps in current knowledge for bumble bee species on both realistic levels for some key exposure routes and cumulative exposure that are not accounted for in the current Apis risk assessment protocols.
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Industry research and approaches to improve the bee risk assessment scheme in Europe
E. Pilling, Dow Agrosciences / REgulatory Sciences; M. Miles, Bayer CropScience UK / Environmental Safety; A. Alix, Dow Agrosciences / Risk Management; J.C. Becker, New York State Dept. of Environmental Conservation / Biology; N. Ruddle, Syngenta Ltd / Product Safety; A. Dinter, Cheminova Deutschland GmbH & Co. KG / Global Regulatory Sciences; A. Sharples, FMC Agricultural Solutions; G. Weyman, ADAMA; L. Oger, ECPA
The crop protection industry recognizes the need to review the bee pollinator risk assessment based on scientific progress. However, the draft EFSA Bee Guidance Document is not a realistically feasible way forward. It is based on extremely conservative assumptions, its study requirements lack clarity and are not workable and guidelines for a number of studies are unavailable or not validated. Industry therefore believes that a revision of the assessment scheme for use by regulatory authorities is needed. Building on an analysis of the proposed developments in the EFSA Bee Guidance Document, we suggest proactive and practical approaches based on analysis of existing data generated thus far on honeybees Using the existing laboratory chronic data generated on adult and larval honeybees, analysis of the EFSA Guidance Tier 1 assessment showed the following: • Almost all substances and uses fail the screening step for chronic risk to larvae and chronic risk to adult honey bees for both spray and solid application types. • For bumble and solitary bees very few substances pass the acute screening step and none pass for chronic risk assessments. • Even known low-bee-toxic substances fail the risk assessment and would need higher tier refinement. In order to pass the assessment, the required doses that would have to be tested would be so high that they would not be technically (solubility) or practically (consumption by the bee) achievable. Results of the Tier 1 assessment following an industry proposed approach will be presented, together with a comparison of existing honeybee and bumblebee data, proposals for protection goals and higher tier testing methodology.\n In its present over-conservative form, the EFSA guidance will make it difficult to register any new or existing insecticide, as well as many herbicides and fungicides. Industry believes that further work and significant revision are required to build a pragmatic, applicable and consistent guidance document within the regulatory framework and has invested much time and money in developing a practical alternative based on the same science.
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Standardization of an in vitro larval rearing method for stingless bee species Melipona scutellaris for use in toxicological bioassay studies.
A.S. Dorigo, Universidade Estadual Paulista Júlio de Mesquita Filho Unesp Rio Claro / Departamento De Biologia, Centro de Estudos de Insetos Sociais; A. Rosa-Fontana, Unesp - Institute of Biology / Departamento De Biologia, Centro de Estudos de Insetos Sociais; R. Cornelio Ferreira Nocelli, Universidade Federal de São Carlos UFSCar Araras / Ciências Biológica Departamento de Ciências da Natureza Matemática e Educação; O. Malaspina, UNESP Universidade Estadual Paulista Júlio de Mesquita Filho / Departamento De Biologia, Centro de Estudos de Insetos Sociais
Brazilhas the greater diversity of native stingless bees of the world and makes intensive use of pesticides. Thus, forager workers may collect pollen and nectar contaminated and, subsequently, to offer the resources to the brood. Studies on larval phase focus on Apis mellifera, since for this species the rearing method is already standardized by the OECD*. However, while in A. mellifera the larval food is progressively offered to the brood, in stingless bees the food consists of en masse deposition. This scenario requires the development of techniques which enable to evaluate the exposure of native bees during larval phase to pesticides, and may be used for public authorities responsible for environmental safety for studies on risk assessments. Melipona scutellaris is an interesting species to be used as
model-organism for risk assessment, since, besides composing the native Brazilian fauna, species from the same genus are recognized as effective pollinator of important crops as eggplant, tomato and sweet pepper. Thus, the present study aimed to propose an in vitro larval rearing method of M. scutellaris. We extracted the larval food from 20 brood cells per non-parental colony (n =3), for estimating the amount of food consumed by larvae. Before the experiments, the acrylic plates with 100 brood cells were placed in glass Petri dishes containing distilled water to keep the humidity around 95% within the Petri dishes during the first five days of rearing. Each artificial cell received 130µL of larval food and, afterwards, 24-hour-old larvae were placed in the food. Then, the plates were kept in an incubator at 30ºC and 75% of relative humidity. After the total consumption of the
food, the humidity within the Petri dishes was reduced to 75%, adding NaCl This technique was carried out five times sequentially, evaluating parameters as
defecation rate, pupation, emergence, and mortality and morphometry of newly emerged workers. For the morphometric analysis we also evaluated newly emerged work from natural brood combs. The survival rates increased gradually according to
72 SETAC Europe 28th Annual Meeting Abstract Book
the progress of the experiments, increasing from 67.1% in the first to 87.8% in the latter, and the morphometric analyzes indicated newly emerged workers in vitro with similar sizes to in vivo. The in vitro rearing method described showed a satisfactory survival rate, as well as produced newly emerged workers with similar to those from natural conditions, allowing its use in toxicity tests.
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Poster spotlight: TU038, TU048, TU052