RDE640 Pesticides in honey 2024

Pollinating insects play an important role in ecosystems and provide a crucial service to the agricultural, horticultural, and gardening sectors. Pollinators provide approximately £0.5 billion to the UK in ecosystem services from agricultural yield improvements alone (Steele et al., 2019). However, UK pollinators are in decline, and they are vulnerable to impacts from pesticide use, which has been shown to influence bee behavior and survival (Stanley et al., 2015).

In addition to honeybees, there are at least 1500 species of insect pollinators in the UK including c. 250 species of bee. Honeybees are normally managed in hives by beekeepers, although wild colonies can exist. Others, like many species of bumblebees, solitary bees, moths, butterflies and hoverflies, live in the wild. Additional data and research are required to understand the impact of pesticides on honeybees and other pollinators. This is particularly true for understanding the post-authorisation exposure risk seen by honeybees under real world field conditions, which are hard to predict in the conventional ecotoxicology phases of the regulatory process.

The National Honey Monitoring Scheme (NHMS) collects honey samples from across the UK from volunteer beekeepers, and currently has an archive of c> 3000 temporally and spatially explicit samples. Whilst these honey samples are not routinely tested for pesticides as part of the NHMS programme, this resource has been developed and trialed through Defra funded projects over the past four years as a cost-effective monitoring programme for assessing long-term trends in the quantified exposure of pesticides to honeybees under normal field conditions.