Despite growing concerns over the impacts of agricultural pesticides on honey bee health, miticides (a group of pesticides used within hives to kill bee parasites) have received little attention. We know very little about how miticides might affect bee cognition, particularly in interaction with other known stressors, such as crop insecticides. Visual learning is essential for foraging bees to find their way to flowers, recognize them, and fly back to the nest. Using a standardized aversive visual conditioning assay, we tested how field exposure to three pesticides affects visual learning in European honey bees (Apis mellifera). Our pesticides were two common miticides, thymol in the commercial formulation Apiguard® and tau-fluvalinate in the formulation Apistan® and one neonicotinoid, imidacloprid. We found no effect of miticides alone, nor of field-relevant doses of imidacloprid alone, but bees exposed to both thymol and imidacloprid showed reduced performance in the visual learning assay.

中文翻译：

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杀螨剂百里酚与微量的新烟碱类吡虫啉结合降低蜜蜂的视觉学习能力（Apis mellifera）

尽管人们越来越担心农用杀虫剂对蜜蜂健康的影响，杀螨剂（一组用于在蜂巢内杀死蜜蜂寄生虫的杀虫剂）却很少受到关注。我们对杀螨剂如何影响蜜蜂认知知之甚少，尤其是与其他已知压力因素（如作物杀虫剂）的相互作用时。视觉学习对于觅食蜜蜂找到通往花朵的路、识别花朵并飞回巢穴至关重要。我们使用标准化的厌恶视觉调节试验，测试了田间暴露于三种农药如何影响欧洲蜜蜂（Apis mellifera）的视觉学习。我们的杀虫剂是两种常见的杀螨剂，商业制剂 Apiguard® 中的百里酚和 Apistan® 制剂中的 tau-fluvalinate，以及一种新烟碱类吡虫啉。我们发现单独的杀螨剂没有效果，