Delayed and time-cumulative toxicity of imidacloprid in bees, ants and termites

Imidacloprid, one of the most commonly used insecticides, is highly toxic to bees and other beneficial insects. The regulatory challenge to determine safe levels of residual pesticides can benefit from information about the time-dependent toxicity of this chemical. Using published toxicity data for imidacloprid for several insect species, we construct time-to-lethal-effect toxicity plots and fit temporal power-law scaling curves to the data. The level of toxic exposure that results in 50% mortality after time t is found to scale as t(1.7) for ants, from t(1.6) to t(5) for honeybees, and from t(1.46) to t(2.9) for termites. We present a simple toxicological model that can explain t(2) scaling. Extrapolating the toxicity scaling for honeybees to the lifespan of winter bees suggests that imidacloprid in honey at 0.25 μg/kg would be lethal to a large proportion of bees nearing the end of their life.