Pesticide exposure can dramatically impact bees’ social behaviors
For bees, being social is everything. Whether it’s foraging for food, caring for the young, using their bodies to generate heat or to fan the nest, or building and repairing nests, a bee colony does just about everything as a single unit. While recent studies have suggested exposure to pesticides could have impacts on foraging behavior, a new study, led by James Crall, has shown that those effects may be just the tip of the iceberg. A postdoctoral fellow working in the lab of Benjamin de Bivort, the Thomas D. Cabot Associate Professor of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, Crall is the lead author of a study that shows exposure to neonicotinoid pesticides (the most commonly used class of pesticides in agriculture) has profound effects on a host of social behaviors. Following exposure to the pesticide, bees spent less time nursing larvae and were less social than other bees. The bees’ behavior was observed using...