Pollen patties may save bees poisoned by pesticides

File photo / Bianca Ackermann

Research has found pollen-inspired microparticles may protect bees from pesticides.

This novel strategy for detoxifying bees exposed to widely-used pesticides was designed using biotechnology.

The authors said that by adding the pollen-like microparticles into supplemental feeds for bees, such as dietary syrup or "pollen patties", this bee detoxification strategy may help to reduce the risk of insecticide exposure to managed bee populations.

Pollinators were vital to preserving ecosystem function for global food production, and insecticide exposure was one of the key global drivers of declines in pollinators.

Organophosphates are a group of common pesticides which are highly toxic to honey bees and bumblebees.

Previous research had suggested phosphotriesterase (OPT), a type of enzyme, could be a potential treatment for exposure to organophosphate insecticides. However, current methods for the use of OPT for bees had low efficacy.

Minglin Ma and colleagues developed uniform and consumable pollen-inspired, calcium carbonate-based microparticles that encapsulated OPT and protected it from degradation during digestion.

The authors administered pollen patties contaminated with malathion (a type of organophosphate insecticide) to microcolonies of bumblebees.

When the bees were fed OPT encapsulated pollen-inspired microparticles there was a 100 per cent survival rate following exposure to malathion for the duration of observation (ten days).

However, there was 0 per cent survival in bees that consumed OPT alone or plain sucrose five and four days after malathion exposure, respectively.

This low-cost, scalable biomaterial approach still needed colony-scale testing, but may act as a precautionary or remedial measure for managed pollinators in areas of organophosphate application, the authors suggest.

The findings were reported in Nature Food.