I'm especially interested in the rate at which neonicotinoid residues in dietary pollen could occur in the secretions that nurse bees feed to other colony members. Is anyone aware of any studies that have addressed this?
dear Sponsler;
about the time and translocation of pesticide for example it depends the hydrophobic characteristics and the reactivity of this xenobiotic, so before you must identify all xenobiotic characters and then the toxicokinetic of this substance.
good luck for you it is very interesting field of research.
Yes, I suppose it does come down to matters of toxicokinetics, which can only be addressed in a compound-specific way. Neonics are usually moderately hydrophilic, though this trait is often enhanced by the adjuvants added to commercial formulations. It seems to me there might be a unimodal relationship between hydrophobicity and translocation to glandular tissue, right? Being hydrophilic would favor uptake from the gut and dispersal through the hemolymph, but being lipophilic might favor absorption into glandular tissue. Conner, Wilkinson, and Morse (1978) found this sort of unimodal relationship with respect to the absorption of insecticides through the honey bee crop cuticle (http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0048357578900731).
Hello Douglas,
The only paper I have seen with anything relevant is Škerl et al. (linked)
They found residues of coumaphos in royal jelly taken from larval cells after application to bees at the top of the frames. There may well be something more directly relevant, but I haven't seen it.
Would be fascinating though, although it will be very specific to the pesticide. For imidacloprid at least, honeybees seem to be able to metabolise it fairly quickly, http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ps.3569/full, so it may not be present in the gland secretions. Would love to know though!
Best wishes,
Jack
http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00128-010-0069-y
Hello Douglas,
Time flies! Do you have any updates on this? As coumaphos is lipophil, I think it does not necessarily represent a suitable equivalent to other common pesticides, Jack already mentioned this.
Collegues of mine however found, that approximately half of the pesticides they fed orally as pollen supplement (7 of 13) could be found in traces in RJ:
Article From field to food—will pesticide-contaminated pollen diet l...
Another article indicates, that the class of neonicotinoid pesticides seem to not only target distinct nicotinic acetylcholin receptors and neurons in the host but also have a negative impact on secretory cells of the hypopharyngal glands reducing ACh levels in royal jelly which can lead to a severely compromised brood development:
Article Honeybees Produce Millimolar Concentrations of Non-Neuronal ...
Regards,
Richard
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