Wired Honeybees Show Harmful Impacts of Pesticides on Navigation

Using tiny radar antennae glued to the backs of honeybees, European scientists have found that bees exposed to neonicotinoid pesticideswere more likely to become disoriented and separated from their hives.

Handout

Honeybee wired with radar antennae

After attaching the small transponders to 200 bees, including some that were fed pesticide-laced syrup, scientists discovered that the exposed bees had difficulty navigating and were unable to retrace the path back to their hives. "We find the control bees are just fantastic — they use their landscape and their vector memory and they do fine," Randolf Menzel, an insect neurobiologist at the Free University in Berlin, told the LondonTelegraph. "The treated bees, depending on the doses of the substance, are more confused." The findings appear to support a theory that neonicotinoids make bees more vulnerable to pathogens and could be a factor in so-called "colony collapse disorder," a phenomenon that has decimated honeybee populations in recent years...published on Yale Environment 360 // visit site