Comparative chronic toxicity of three neonicotinoids on New Zealand packaged honey bees
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Thiamethoxam, clothianidin, and imidacloprid are the most commonly used neonicotinoid insecticides on the Canadian prairies. There is widespread contamination of nectar and pollen with neonicotinoids, at concentrations which are sublethal for honey bees (Apis mellifera Linnaeus). OBJECTIVE: We compared the effects of chronic, sublethal exposure to the three most commonly used neonicotinoids on honey bee colonies established from New Zealand packaged bees using colony weight gain, brood area, and population size as measures of colony performance. METHODS: From May 7 to July 29, 2016 (12 weeks), sixty-eight colonies received weekly feedings of sugar syrup and pollen patties containing 0 nM, 20 nM (median environmental dose), or 80 nM (high environmental dose) of one of three neonicotinoids (thiamethoxam, clothianidin, and imidacloprid). Colonies were weighed at three-week intervals. Brood area and population size were determined from digital images of colonies at week 12. Statistical analyses were performed by ANOVA and mixed models. RESULTS: There was a significant negative effect (-30%, p<0.01) on colony weight gain (honey production) after 9 and 12 weeks of exposure to 80 nM of thiamethoxam, clothianidin, or imidacloprid and on bee cluster size (-21%, p<0.05) after 12 weeks. Analysis of brood area and number of adult bees lacked adequate (>80%) statistical power to detect an effect. CONCLUSIONS: Chronic exposure of honey bees to high environmental doses of neonicotinoids has negative effects on honey production. Brood area appears to be less sensitive to detect sublethal effects of neonicotinoids.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".