Common pyrethroid pesticides — even at doses too low to kill bees — impair honey bees' ability to learn and remember which flowers smell like food, threatening their effectiveness as pollinators.
1
Sublethal doses of permethrin and cypermethrin impaired both habituation (non-associative learning) and olfactory associative learning and memory in honey bees.
2
Calcium imaging showed cypermethrin did not alter odor signal intensity or the distinctiveness of odor patterns in the antennal lobe (primary smell-processing region), pointing to higher brain centers as the site of cognitive disruption.
3
Honey bees are responsible for approximately 80% of human crop pollination, meaning cognitive impairment from widely-used pesticides carries significant agricultural and ecological consequences.
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