Dipartimento di Scienze Chimiche, Università degli Studi di Padova, Padova, Italy.
Anal Bioanal Chem. 2013 Jan;405(2-3):1007-14. doi: 10.1007/s00216-012-6338-3. Epub 2012 Sep 11.
In the understanding of colony loss phenomena, a worldwide crisis of honeybee colonies which has serious consequences for both apiculture and bee-pollination-dependent farm production, analytical chemistry can play an important role. For instance, rapid and accurate analytical procedures are currently required to better assess the effects of neonicotinoid insecticides on honeybee health. Since their introduction in agriculture, neonicotinoid insecticides have been blamed for being highly toxic to honeybees, possibly at the nanogram per bee level or lower. As a consequence, most of the analytical methods recently optimized have focused on the analysis of ultratraces of neonicotinoids using liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry techniques to study the effects of sublethal doses. However, recent evidences on two novel routes-seedling guttations and seed coating particulate, both associated with corn crops-that may expose honeybees to huge amounts of neonicotinoids in the field, with instantly lethal effects, suggest that selected procedures need optimizing. In the present work, a simplified ultra-high-performance liquid chromatography-diode-array detection method for the determination of neonicotinoids in single bees has been optimized and validated. The method ensures good selectivity, good accuracy, and adequate detection limits, which make it suitable for the purpose, while maintaining its ability to evaluate exposure variability of individual bees. It has been successfully applied to the analysis of bees in free flight over an experimental sowing field, with the bees therefore being exposed to seed coating particulate released by the pneumatic drilling machine.
在理解蜂群损失现象方面，全球性的蜜蜂蜂群危机对养蜂业和依赖蜜蜂授粉的农业生产都产生了严重影响，分析化学可以发挥重要作用。例如，目前需要快速、准确的分析程序来更好地评估新烟碱类杀虫剂对蜜蜂健康的影响。自从新烟碱类杀虫剂引入农业以来，它们被指责对蜜蜂具有高度毒性，可能在纳克/只或更低的水平。因此，最近优化的大多数分析方法都集中在使用液相色谱-质谱技术分析新烟碱类的痕量，以研究亚致死剂量的影响。然而，最近有证据表明，两种新途径——幼苗吐水和种子包衣颗粒，都与玉米作物有关，可能使蜜蜂在田间接触到大量新烟碱类杀虫剂，产生即时致命的影响，这表明需要优化选定的程序。在本工作中，优化并验证了一种用于单个蜜蜂中新型烟碱类杀虫剂的简化超高效液相色谱-二极管阵列检测方法。该方法确保了良好的选择性、良好的准确性和足够的检测限，使其适用于该目的，同时保持了评估个体蜜蜂暴露变异性的能力。该方法已成功应用于实验播种田间自由飞行蜜蜂的分析，因此蜜蜂会接触到气动播种机释放的种子包衣颗粒。
