Solitary bees absorb far more metal pollution than honey bees do
Durkalec M, Nawrocka A, Jitaru P, Chauzat MP, Laurent M, Albrecht M, Costa C, De la Rúa P, Klein AM, Mänd M, Potts SG, Rundlöf M, Schweiger O, Bottero I, Cini E, R de Miranda J, Di Prisco G, Dominik C, Hodge S, Karise R, Knapp J, Knauer A, Martínez-López V, Medrzycki P, Pereira-Peixoto H, Raimets R, Schwarz J, Senapathi D, Tamburini G, Brown MJF, Stout JC, Kiljanek T.
Pollinators
If you grow apples or plant flowers to support pollinators, the fungicides and soil particles those blooms pick up are landing hardest on the wild solitary bees quietly nesting nearby, not the honey bees beekeepers manage.
Bees pick up traces of metals like copper, arsenic, and cadmium from pollen, nectar, dust, and even air pollution as they forage. Scientists tested pollen collected by honey bees, bumble bees, and red mason bees across apple orchards and canola fields in eight European countries, and found that red mason bees, which nest alone rather than in hives, packed away pollen with far higher metal levels than the other two species. That's a problem because most safety research is built around honey bees, so it may be missing the bigger exposure risk facing solitary wild bees.
Key Findings
Red mason bee pollen contained several-fold higher trace element concentrations than honey bee or bumble bee pollen across 128 orchard and oilseed rape sites in 8 countries
Apple orchard pollen had higher copper levels than oilseed rape pollen, likely from copper-based fungicide sprays
Landscape features like crop cover and urban land use shifted trace element levels in both stored pollen and honey bee workers, though risk from arsenic, cadmium, copper, and mercury was generally low to negligible where toxicity data existed
chevron_right Technical Summary
Wild solitary bees called red mason bees pick up several times more heavy metals from pollen than honey bees do, meaning the honey bee data scientists usually rely on may be underestimating pollution risks to other pollinators.
Abstract Preview
Original paper
From flowers to pollinators: Dietary exposure of honey bees, bumble bees and solitary bees to trace elements across European fields.
Trace elements are persistent contaminants that enter bee diets through pollen, nectar, soil-derived particles and atmospheric deposition, yet field-based exposure data for pollinator taxa remain l...
open_in_new Read full abstractAbstract copyright held by the original publisher.
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