Skip to main content
2023 ESA Annual Meeting Main banner
Icon Legend
This session is not in your schedule.
This session is in your schedule. Click again to remove it.
Back

Contributed Talk

Session: : Pollination 1

COS 19-2 - Historical collections data reveals pesticide use linked to the decrease in bee occupancy across the United States

Monday, August 7, 2023
1:45 PM – 2:00 PM PDT
Location: E143
Abstract: Native bees have been well documented to be in decline, the reasons include climate change, pesticide use, and disease spillover. One candidate explanation in the United States is the large extent of pesticide use. Laboratory and field studies have shown that pesticides affects survival, behavior, colony production, and immune responses in honey bees and native bees. However, it is unclear whether these documented negative impacts translate into large declines across wild bee communities. Demonstrating this is difficult because monitoring many species of bees at a country wide scale is challenging. By aggregating the largest data-set on bee occurrences that comprises museum records, ecological surveys, and community science data, and explicitly modelling climate change, agricultural use, and pesticide use, we are able to show for the first time that pesticides are a major cause of bee declines across the United States and contributed to range loss of up to 86% of the species in certain agricultural regions. These results suggest that there is a trade-off between pesticide use and preserving pollinators.