Contact toxicity of three insecticides for use in tier I pesticide risk assessments with <i>Megachile rotundata</i> (Hymenoptera: Megachilidae)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The current pesticide risk assessment paradigm may not adequately protect solitary bees as it focuses primarily on the honey bee ( Apis mellifera ). The alfalfa leafcutting bee ( Megachile rotundata ) is a potential surrogate species for use in pesticide risk assessment for solitary bees in North America. However, the toxicity of potential toxic reference standards to M. rotundata will need to be determined before pesticide risk assessment tests (tier I trials) can be implemented. Therefore, we assessed the acute topical toxicity and generated LD 50 values for three insecticides: dimethoate (62.08 ng a.i./bee), permethrin (50.01 ng a.i./bee), and imidacloprid (12.82 ng a.i/bee). The variation in the mass of individual bees had a significant but small effect on these toxicity estimates. Overall, the toxicity of these insecticides to M. rotundata were within the 10-fold safety factor currently used with A. mellifera toxicity estimates from tier I trials to estimate risk to other bee species. Therefore, tier I pesticide risk assessments with solitary bees may not be necessary, and efforts could be directed to developing more realistic, higher-tier pesticide risk assessment trials for solitary bees.
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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 | 0.001 | 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) | 0.001 | 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".