EFSA reviews study protocols for assessing agrochemicals'effects on bees

The European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) has performed peer reviews of study protocols submitted by four companies to assess the effects of clothianidin, thiamethoxam, imidacloprid and fipronil on bees. The protocols were presented by BASF for fipronil, Bayer CropScience for clothianidin and imidacloprid, Syngenta for thiamethoxam and Sumitomo Chemical for clothianidin. These peer reviews aim to support EFSA and Member States in assessing the quality and consistency of protocols submitted by these companies in the context of the upcoming post-approval assessments.

The European Commission has adopted a restriction on the use of clothianidin, imidacloprid, fipronil and thiamethoxam for a period of two years. Except fipronil, the other three pesticides all belong to neonicotinoids family. The commission’s action is a response to EFSA’s scientific report which identified “high acute risks” for bees as regards exposure to dust in several crops such as maize and cereals, to residue in pollen and nectar in crops like oilseed rape and sunflower and to guttation in maize.

The four companies were required to submit further confirmatory information as regards the risk of their products to bees by 31 December 2014. To ensure common understanding and harmonisation of the assessments, the Commission requested EFSA to organize a peer review of bee study protocols related to these substances. The final consultation reports on the conclusions arising from the peer reviews were published recently.

Bayer and Sumitomo are performing field experiments on clothianidin residues in nectar and pollen of flowering rotational crops, acute contact and oral toxicity to bumble bees and effect of clothianidin on guttation water on bees’ colony. For imidacloprid, Bayer is also carrying out the similar experiments as for clothianidin. BASF is doing field monitoring to determine the occurrence of bees and attractiveness of guttation water and honeydew to bees in onion fields after fipronil treatment. While for thiamethoxam, Syngenta is evaluating side effects of thiamethoxam on bees in winter oil seed rape after treatment.

The comments from Member States and EFSA covered many aspects, including more detailed explanation on protocols or experimental rationales, experimental methodology (soil, pollen and/or nectar sampling, time of sampling), the possibility of extrapolating experimental results to other crop species, statistic parameters (soil organic matter, PH, humidity) and the power of statistic.