The impact of pollen quality on the sensitivity of bumblebees to pesticides

With 2000 species currently recorded in Europe, bees are a highly diversified and efficient group of pollinating insects. Their decline could therefore lead to a risk for ecosystems functioning and crop yields. The drivers of this decline have been well documented in Europe and involve multiple factors such as pesticides, pathogens, poor nutrition, climate change, and their respective interactions. For pesticides, there is a lack of information concerning the impacts of exposure when the bees have access to pollen diet of different nutritional quality (e.g. variation in sterol and protein content). We performed bioassays on nine groups consisting of 10 Bombus terrestris microcolonies (i.e. queen less colonies) each in a fully crossed experiment including controls without pesticide, two different doses of neonicotinoid imidacloprid (2 and 20 μg/L) and three pollen diets (i.e. Salix mix, cellulose-diluted Salix mix and cellulose-diluted Salix mix enriched with soy protein). All colonies were fed ad libitum with syrup and pollen. We measured the collection of pollen and syrup, the brood mass and the pollen efficacy (ratio of brood mass/pollen) at the end of the experiment. All these variables were affected by the imidacloprid doses, especially pollen efficacy, which was two and 10 times lower than the control for the 2 and 20 μg/L treatments, respectively. As expected, pollen efficacy was also affected by the pollen diet. However, when exposed to imidacloprid, the three different pollen diets did not affect micro-colonies performances. Overall, we show that diet quality does not affect sensitivity to imidacloprid exposure. It seems therefore that the negative effects of imidacloprid exposure cannot be compensated for by a pollen diet of high quality.