Institute of Insect Biotechnology, Justus-Liebig-University Giessen, Giessen, Germany.
Animal Ecology I, University of Bayreuth, Universitaetsstr. 30, 95447, Bayreuth, Germany.
Sci Rep. 2021 Jan 8;11(1):62. doi: 10.1038/s41598-020-79660-w.
Sublethal doses of pesticides affect individual honeybees, but colony-level effects are less well understood and it is unclear how the two levels integrate. We studied the effect of the neonicotinoid pesticide clothianidin at field realistic concentrations on small colonies. We found that exposure to clothianidin affected worker jelly production of individual workers and created a strong dose-dependent increase in mortality of individual larvae, but strikingly the population size of capped brood remained stable. Thus, hives exhibited short-term resilience. Using a demographic matrix model, we found that the basis of resilience in dosed colonies was a substantive increase in brood initiation rate to compensate for increased brood mortality. However, computer simulation of full size colonies revealed that the increase in brood initiation led to severe reductions in colony reproduction (swarming) and long-term survival. This experiment reveals social regulatory mechanisms on colony-level that enable honeybees to partly compensate for effects on individual level.
亚致死剂量的农药会影响单个蜜蜂，但群体水平的影响还不太清楚，也不清楚这两个水平如何整合。我们研究了新烟碱类杀虫剂噻虫胺在田间实际浓度下对小群体的影响。我们发现，接触噻虫胺会影响工蜂的果冻生产，导致个体幼虫的死亡率呈强烈的剂量依赖性增加，但令人惊讶的是，封盖幼虫的种群数量保持稳定。因此，蜂群表现出短期的弹性。使用人口矩阵模型，我们发现，在接受处理的蜂群中，恢复力的基础是大量增加幼虫孵化率，以弥补增加的幼虫死亡率。然而，对全尺寸蜂群的计算机模拟显示，幼虫孵化率的增加导致了蜂群繁殖（分蜂）和长期生存的严重减少。这项实验揭示了群体水平上的社会调节机制，使蜜蜂能够部分补偿个体水平上的影响。
