Before an insecticide can be sprayed onto crops it undergoes testing procedures to establish whether it is safe for insect pollinators. Unfortunately, the testing systems haven’t worked as intended. Indeed, after they had been initially approved,  several insecticides had to be banned because of the severe harm they cause to insect pollinators.

The limitations of established testing procedures for detecting insecticide safety come have three main causes. 

1. Testing is limited to measuring the survival of individual insects. We now know that although an insect is alive, intoxication by an insecticide can severely reduce its ability to pollinate, reproduce, and survive in the wild.

2. Testing uses high doses of insecticides over short periods of time. This is unlikely to be representative of the long-term, chronic exposure to small doses of insecticides that also occurs in agricultural landscapes. 

3. Testing focuses on the honeybee Apis mellifera, or a few other species. Toxicity measurements are then extrapolated to thousands of other wild pollinators. This ignores complex differences across pollinating insects in life histories and physiologies.

Recent improvements in insecticide testing procedures also recommend measuring the effects of 10 day-long exposure on behaviour of the buff-tailed bumble bee, Bombus terrestris. Such methods, however, still provide a limited number of measurements that are hard to extrapolate to and compare between other species.

High-resolution molecular approaches provide tens of thousands of meaningful measurements from each insect, offering a powerful improvement to the insecticide testing practices.