The Acute Oral Toxicity of 300 Formulated Pesticides to Apis mellifera

[Aims]honey bee is one of the most important insects for plant pollination,but the honey bees are underlying the phenomenon of colony collapse disorder(ccD),one of the factors causing this problem is the much use of pesticides in agricultural production.Totally 300 pesticides were tested for their acute oral toxicity to honey bee(Apis mellifera)by dietary method in the paper,the objective of this study is to understand the status of toxicity of common used pesticides.[Results]The results indicated that the pesticides with very high toxicity,high toxicity,moderate toxicity and low toxicity pesticides accounted for 14.7,35.6,10.7,39%respectively,the high toxic and very high toxic pesticide covered more than 50%,and these pesticides were mainly the insecticides,while the fungicides and herbicides with relative low toxicity.The toxicity of different pesticide formulations with the same active ingredients(AI)to zebra fish maybe varied for the difference in Ai content,formulation type and processing technique.regarding to the biological pesticides,some of them still have high toxicity to honeybee.[Conclusions]These results suggested that the pesticides with high toxicity to honey bee covered a large proportion of common used pesticides in china,therefore,some precautions should be involved as we used the pesticides,particularly for insecticides to reduce or avoid the side effects on honey bee.