Skip to main content
Entomology 2023 Main banner
Bayer
Icon Legend
This session is not in your schedule.
This session is in your schedule. Click again to remove it.
Presentation Icons
In-Person
In-Person
On-Demand
On-Demand
Student Competition
Student Competition
Poster
Poster
Ticketed Event
Ticketed Event
Back
ViewAttendees 2

Student 10-Minute Paper

Physiology, Biochemistry, and Toxicology

Student Competition

Student

Grad Competition PBT: Biochemistry and Chemical Ecology

(1st Place) Effects of sublethal glyphosate exposure on honey bee foraging, recruitment, and brain supply of key biogenic amines and their biosynthetic precursors

Monday, November 6, 2023
8:48 AM – 9:00 AM ET
Location: Gaylord National Resort & Convention Center, Azalea 1
In-Person Student Competition
Honey bees (Apis mellifera L.) are generalist foragers of floral resources, where they may encounter a wide variety of pesticide residues and experience a range of effects from lethal to sublethal. Curiously, the widely-used herbicide glyphosate (GLY) exerts sublethal effects on honey bees despite having no described mechanism of action in insects. However, certain members of the honey bee gut microbiome do possess GLY’s molecular target in the shikimate pathway and are vulnerable to GLY exposure. The shikimate pathway produces tyrosine (Tyr), a biosynthetic precursor to neurotransmitters dopamine (DA) and octopamine (OA), both of which in turn affect foraging behavior and learning in bees. Here we investigated the effect of sublethal, field-realistic glyphosate exposure on honey bee foraging and recruitment behaviors, as well as on brain supply of key neurotransmitters and precursor molecules. We trained bees to forage at equidistant artificial feeders, containing either treatment (1M sucrose solution + 5ug GLY / L) or control (1M sucrose solution), to determine the effect of GLY on foraging frequency, foraging persistency, dance propensity, and dance frequency. Bees exposed to GLY decreased their foraging frequency by 14.3%, although there was no effect on persistency. We then examined the effect of treatment on brain supply of DA, OA, and Tyr via LC-MS/MS. Because GLY is registered as an herbicide and considered non-toxic to insects, these data represent an important step in clarifying its effects on pollinators to guide reregistration decisions and protection strategies.