Honey bee hives as biomonitors of pesticide environmental pollution. The INSIGNIA-EU monitoring action

Honey bee hives provide invaluable advantages as effective tools for monitoring pesticides, providing protected environments with consistent temperature, humidity, and airflow. They continuously accumulate pesticides from the surrounding area due to both airflow and honey bee foraging activity, which efficiently transport pesticides to the colony over space and time. This study presents extensive European monitoring data collected using a noninvasive in-hive passive sampler, the APIStrip, which employs TENAX® and is effective at adsorbing pesticides.

As part of the INSIGNIA-EU monitoring action (www.insignia-bee.eu), APIStrips were deployed in georeferenced apiaries across all 27 EU countries. Apiary selection was based on key factors, including agricultural, artificial, and forest/natural land use categories. Sampling was conducted simultaneously across all apiaries over nine consecutive two-week periods from May to August 2023. Of the 429 pesticide compounds targeted in the analysis, 188 were detected in the 5524 APIStrips analyzed.

As expected, agricultural areas presented the highest pesticide levels, with notable variations in the number of compounds detected and amounts found between the apiaries. Azoxystrobin, boscalid, tebuconazole, acetamiprid, and fluopyram were found in more than 50 % of sampling sites evaluated. Overall, and across all sampling rounds, 96.4 % of APIstrips contained at least one pesticide. This study has produced the first EU-wide distribution map of terrestrial pesticide contamination and demonstrates widespread pesticide contamination of EU environments.