scholarly journals Pesticide residues in daily bee pollen samples (April–July) from an intensive agricultural region in Southern Germany

Author(s):  
Carolin Friedle ◽  
Klaus Wallner ◽  
Peter Rosenkranz ◽  
Dieter Martens ◽  
Walter Vetter

AbstractInsect-pollinated plants are essential for honey bees to feed their brood. In agricultural landscapes, honey bees and other pollinators are often exposed to pesticides used for cultivation. In order to gain more insight into the fluctuation of pesticide loads, 102 daily pollen samples were collected between April and July 2018 in a fruit-growing area in Southern Germany. Samples were analyzed with respect to more than 260 pesticides using a multi-residue pesticide analysis method. Almost 90% of the analyzed pollen samples featured between one and thirteen different pesticides. In total, 29 pesticides were detected at maximum concentrations of up to 4500 ng/g pollen. Maximum residual concentrations of most pesticides were observed during April and the first half of May, as well as during the second half of June. In most cases, serial data of pesticide residuals were detected for approximately 10 subsequent days with two or three maximum values, which were several folds higher than concentrations on the days before and thereafter. The pollen hazard quotient (PHQ) was calculated to estimate the risk of the detected pesticides to honey bees and wild pollinators.

Insects ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (9) ◽  
pp. 280 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jon Zawislak ◽  
John Adamczyk ◽  
Donald R. Johnson ◽  
Gus Lorenz ◽  
Joe Black ◽  
...  

Honey bees forage across a large area, continually scouting the local landscape for ephemeral food resources. Beekeepers often rely on flowering plants in and around irrigated farmland to maintain their colonies during dry seasons, despite the potential risk of pesticide exposure. Recent declines in pollinator abundance and diversity have focused attention on the role of pesticides and their effects on honey bee health. This investigation examined two types of landscapes within a two-mile (3.2 km) radius of honey bee colonies: an intensive agricultural setting and a rural setting without intensive agriculture. More than 10,000 acres of agricultural land was surveyed to quantify the area of cultivated crops and the area treated with pesticides, including seed treatments and foliar applications of insecticides. Samples of honey, bee bread (stored pollen), beeswax, and adult bees were collected from hives in both landscape types and screened for pesticide residues to determine if foraging bees were transporting pesticides to hives. Some samples of bee bread and honey did contain pesticide residues, but these were below known lethal dose (LD50) levels for honey bees. Beeswax samples contained the highest levels of contamination, but most were still relatively low. Samples were screened for 174 common agricultural pesticides and metabolites, but only 26 compounds were detected during the two-year study. These included one defoliant, one insect growth regulator, five herbicides, six fungicides, six insecticides never used in beekeeping, and five insecticides/miticides and their metabolites, which are used in beekeeping and for various other agricultural purposes, as well as two miticides exclusively used by beekeepers to control Varroa destructor. Bee colonies foraging in agricultural landscapes are potentially exposed to numerous pesticide applications. While the residues detected in this study did not pose an acute lethal risk to adult honey bees, this study did not measure sublethal effects on bee colony health or performance, which merit further investigation.


2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (8) ◽  
pp. 168781402093046 ◽  
Author(s):  
Noor Saeed Khan ◽  
Qayyum Shah ◽  
Arif Sohail

Entropy generation in bioconvection two-dimensional steady incompressible non-Newtonian Oldroyd-B nanofluid with Cattaneo–Christov heat and mass flux theory is investigated. The Darcy–Forchheimer law is used to study heat and mass transfer flow and microorganisms motion in porous media. Using appropriate similarity variables, the partial differential equations are transformed into ordinary differential equations which are then solved by homotopy analysis method. For an insight into the problem, the effects of various parameters on different profiles are shown in different graphs.


Transport ◽  
2009 ◽  
Vol 24 (3) ◽  
pp. 192-199 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ilona Jaržemskienė

The measurement of terminal productivity is the issue of extreme importance to both terminal owners and management and customers. As the sector of transport is highly intensive in terms of investments into the infrastructure, the productivity of a terminal may play a crucial role in competing with other terminals. Productivity is defined in terms of inputs and output. The majority of the available studies, wherein this issue is addressed, are generally focused on the determination of functional dependence between inputs and output using the method of regressive analysis. The present article provides an insight into the Data Envelopment Analysis method as a tool for measuring productivity. This technique enables a rather accurate evaluation of terminal productivity by means of comparative analysis, which, in fact, appears to be the only feasible alternative in cases where statistic data required for performing regressive analysis is lacking.


2010 ◽  
Vol 41 (2) ◽  
pp. 126-133 ◽  
Author(s):  
N. Kalamaras ◽  
H. Michalopoulou ◽  
H. R. Byun

In this study a method proposed by Byun & Wilhite, which estimates drought severity and duration using daily precipitation values, is applied to data from stations at different locations in Greece. Subsequently, a series of indices is calculated to facilitate the detection of drought events at these sites. The results provide insight into the trend of drought severity in the region. In addition, the seasonal distribution of days with moderate and severe drought is examined. Finally, the Hierarchical Cluster Analysis method is used to identify sites with similar drought features.


Apidologie ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 51 (2) ◽  
pp. 180-200 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sara Rodney ◽  
Vincent J. Kramer

AbstractRecent concerns regarding potential effects of pesticides on pollinators have prompted regulatory agencies to estimate dietary ingestion rates for honey bees (Apis mellifera). The task is difficult because of the complex caste and food storage systems in honey bee colonies. Considerable data on the nutrition and energetics of honey bees have recently been collated. These data were used to parameterize a probabilistic model estimating nectar requirements of nectar foragers. Median estimates were more than 6× lower than the recommended median value from the North American government agencies, of 292 mg nectar/bee/day. The distribution of estimates had much greater variability than those of the agencies. The differences are due primarily to the disparate assumptions regarding how much time nectar foragers spend flying and foraging. Risk assessors considering honey bee dietary exposure should take account of current and emerging data providing insight into nectar forager dietary requirements, foraging activity, and feeding behavior.


2010 ◽  
Vol 36 (3) ◽  
pp. 535-568 ◽  
Author(s):  
Deyi Xiong ◽  
Min Zhang ◽  
Aiti Aw ◽  
Haizhou Li

Linguistic knowledge plays an important role in phrase movement in statistical machine translation. To efficiently incorporate linguistic knowledge into phrase reordering, we propose a new approach: Linguistically Annotated Reordering (LAR). In LAR, we build hard hierarchical skeletons and inject soft linguistic knowledge from source parse trees to nodes of hard skeletons during translation. The experimental results on large-scale training data show that LAR is comparable to boundary word-based reordering (BWR) (Xiong, Liu, and Lin 2006), which is a very competitive lexicalized reordering approach. When combined with BWR, LAR provides complementary information for phrase reordering, which collectively improves the BLEU score significantly. To further understand the contribution of linguistic knowledge in LAR to phrase reordering, we introduce a syntax-based analysis method to automatically detect constituent movement in both reference and system translations, and summarize syntactic reordering patterns that are captured by reordering models. With the proposed analysis method, we conduct a comparative analysis that not only provides the insight into how linguistic knowledge affects phrase movement but also reveals new challenges in phrase reordering.


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