Pesticides play a crucial role in our environment and are essential for sustaining food production. However, our understanding of the impact pesticides can have on insects remains limited, particularly when used in combinations. This lack of knowledge is particularly concerning for insect pollinators, such as bumblebees, which are exposed to these substances while foraging.
The goal of this project is to develop a method that allows to expose individual bumblebees with known doses of pesticides, both as single compounds and binary mixtures. Bumblebees will be exposed acutely (a single dose) and chronically (over days). You will quantify the impact on bumblebees by monitoring lethality and motor impairments resulting from the ingested doses of commonly used pesticides. The long-term goal is to use the data to test the sublethal effects of pesticides in behavioural assays.
The laboratory work will involve the manipulation of insects, optimising a feeding method specifically designed for bumblebees to determine the intake dose for each individual, developing an ethogram, and analysing binary data using modelling techniques.
If you are interested in this project and would like to know more, please contact me: silvia.ronnau@biol.lu.se