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AS about sublethal effects of environmental contaminants was provided in a review titled “Why bees are so vulnerable to environmental stressors” (Klein et al., 2017). Klein and colleagues focused on the demands of central place foraging as key to understanding the risks faced by many bee populations, although best studied in honey bees. The authors guide the reader through a step-by-step account of how stressors that impact brain structure and function can disrupt foraging in individual bees. They noted that, at the level of the individual bee, behavioral effects of chemical exposures can be subtle and, in the short term, even beneficial to a colony, but that conditions of prolonged stress may result in colony collapse.
This disparity between short-term/benefits, long-term disadvantages is similar to views of stress physiology in vertebrates (McEwen, 2007). An important example of this dichotomy in honey bees (other bee species are rarely studied in this regard) is timing Spain phone number list of the transition from in-hive work to foraging. An acceleration of this transition is a response to numerous environmental stressors.Using precocious foraging to make up for a shortfall in the foraging force – as might be required, for example, after a pesticide kill – might carry brood production through a difficult time but can result in a long-term poor outcome for the colony.
Using the single cohort colony technique for precocious induction of foraging (Robinson et al., 1989; Ueno et al., 2016), Perry and colleagues tracked the onset of foraging in individual honey bees using RFID tags. Bees growing up in single cohort colonies were more likely to start flying before 14 days of age than their counterparts in typical colonies (Perry et al., 2015). These precocious foragers collectively took fewer foraging trips and had shorter foraging careers than bees with later foraging onset. The experimental results supported a demographic.
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