UC San Diego

Learning is important for both honey bee fitness and the pollination services they provide. Neonicotinoid pesticides impair learning, fitness, colony health, and pollination. However, most studies on learning have only looked at the effect of neonicotinoid pesticides on olfactory learning. We found that bees fed field realistic doses of 0.8 ng/bee and 1.34 ng/bee of the neonicotinoid pesticide, thiamethoxam had increased abnormal behaviors such as falling. In addition, the doses decreased the time they took to complete each learning trial and took less time to make decisions, suggesting hyperactivity. However, there was no effect of these thiamethoxam doses on bee learning or memory. We used an adaptation of a T-maze bioassay from Han et al. (2010) and simulated flower color with blue and yellow colored lights to classically condition bees. By using a previously developed bioassay we hope that our methods are easily replicable and can be improved upon easily. Our results suggest that more studies should be conducted on the effects of pesticides in visual learning in A. mellifera and other related species.