6 Apr 2018 Abstracts

Effects of Imidacloprid and Clothianidin on Apis mellifera

Kayla Hayes '18

Colony Collapse Disorder is a recently identified syndrome in Apis mellifera that results in the collapse of honey bee colonies and caused large colony losses in the winters of 2006 and 2007. As honey bees are an extremely vital agricultural pollinator and the cause of CCD is not definitively known, it is important to research and identify possible causes of CCD in order to prevent widespread losses from it moving forwards. In this study, Lu et al. (2014) hypothesized that sublethal exposure to neonicotinoid insecticides, in this case imidacloprid and clothianidin, would result in previously healthy A. mellifera colonies developing CCD. To test this hypothesis they used 18 colonies split between 3 different apiaries and fed them either untreated sugar water, sugar water treated with imidacloprid, or sugar water treated with clothianidin for 13 weeks, observing the colonies during and after this treatment period. As a result of this experiment, 6 of the treated colonies collapsed in a way similar to CCD while the other 6 either lacked a queen or failed to produce a brood in the following spring. Although the results of this study look promising, questions remain about the role of neonicotinoids in CCD and the methodology of the study.