While I understand your concern, in the 70s and 80s a lot of studies were done on pesticides and effects on colony health in honeybees. Since wild bees are often hard to find in their colonies and their nest is often smaller in numbers or in gregarious species and annual in some primative species it would be difficult to see the affects of the various treatments. Also because of the diversity of the group Apiodea it would be hard to target one over another. We have a much longer and more involved evolution with honey bees thereby we tend to use them as our "white mice".

Bring in the difficulty of tracing their behaviours (the other bees) and since many of them haven't been well studied (not of enough commercial value, *sigh* "sad"). So since honeybees are in large colonies, able to be kept relatively well in "captivity" it is the host insect of choice for pesticide impacts on "bees" in general. Hope that helped, Les

The honest answer is that we don't know. As Leslie pointed out honeybees have been our ecotox drosophila since long. We have very little information on other bees. However, there is, at least in Europe, currently much concern over what is referred to as "non-Apis" pollinators and a large scale testing effort (mainly by the crop protection industry) is now gaining momentum. For practical reasons this mainly concerns species that can be cultured such as Osmia and Bombus, but the answer is on its way! For Bombus there is already a history of testing side-effects and methods have been developed and tested. One of the pioneers of this work is Sjef van der Steen and he has repeatedly pointed at differences with honeybees. I remember him saying that toxicologically speaking "a bumblebee is not just a large honeybee". Best, Frank

Many of the 20,000 Apoidea species are known from just a few specimens. The importance of bumble bees as pollinators for Solanaceous crops has been recognized, but very little work has been done on pesticide resistance. In countries like India, wide spectrum insecticides are routinely used indiscriminately. So the outlook at present is bleak, but, as Frank states, hope is on its way... :)