Landscapes of pesticide risk | Nature Ecology & Evolution

A large-scale field study finds that different bee species experience different levels of risk from pesticides, depending on how much land is farmed within their foraging range. For bumblebees and solitary bees, more seminatural habitat means less risk from pesticides, but this is not true for honeybees.

In the discussion of how to protect bees from pesticides, bees are often treated as a monolith. It is assumed that what is good for one species is good for all, and that pesticides or changes to agricultural landscapes would affect all bee species equally. This is often taken one step…