Publications by authors named "Ashley A Fersch"
Article Synopsis
- Honey bees are often exposed to pesticides like the fungicide captan and the insecticide thiamethoxam during pollination, and their effects were studied both individually and in combination.
- Laboratory tests showed that captan significantly increases larvae mortality, while the combination of both pesticides showed some synergistic effects only at high doses.
- In field tests with whole colonies exposed to low doses, the pesticides had minimal impact on colony health, suggesting bees might compensate for toxicity, but further research is needed to understand long-term effects and implications for other pollinators.
Pollinator reductions can leave communities less diverse and potentially at increased risk of infectious diseases. Species-rich plant and bee communities have high species turnover, making the study of disease dynamics challenging. To address how temporal dynamics shape parasite prevalence in plant and bee communities, we screened >5,000 bees and flowers over an entire growing season for five common bee microparasites (Nosema ceranae, Nosema bombi, Crithidia bombi, Crithidia expoeki and neogregarines).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFHoney bees provide critical pollination services for many agricultural crops. While the contribution of pesticides to current hive loss rates is debated, remarkably little is known regarding the magnitude of risk to bees and mechanisms of exposure during pollination. Here, we show that pesticide risk in recently accumulated beebread was above regulatory agency levels of concern for acute or chronic exposure at 5 and 22 of the 30 apple orchards, respectively, where we placed 120 experimental hives.
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