Booth Id:
ANIM060
Category:
Animal Sciences
Year:
2022
Finalist Names:
Xu, Justine (School: St. John's School)
Abstract:
Pesticides pose an increasing issue in the survivorship of bees in their normal lives, so this project can
help solidify the fact that dangerous chemicals should not be as easily accessible to the common public
as it is right now, and different solutions should be created that will take better account of non-targeted
victims. The purpose of my project was to find the LC50 of 1-naphthyl-N-methylcarbamate, a highly toxic
insecticide, in a commercial insecticide on honeybees on Guam. Bees are currently an endangered
species so this project aims to save their population by discovering the actual lethality of the solution and
what the concentration of the solution that kills 50% of the bees after the observation time is. Different
percentages of stock concentration with the carbaryl concentration were mixed in with honey and
ingested by the bees. Using a serial dilution, the percentages of concentration of a commercial
insecticide to water tested were 100%, 75%, 50%, 25%, 12.5%, 6.25%, and 0%, which corresponded to
their respective carbaryl concentrations. Observations were made after 24 hours and 48 hours, and all
data was collected and fitted to an exponential decay function (y = 80.5e^-6.73x for the first day). The
LC50 found was much smaller than what was anticipated, 0.0000889% of carbaryl after the first day and
0.0000436% of carbaryl after the second day of observation, signaling the toxicity of an insecticide and just how
dangerous it is to bees at the current state, given how easy it is for one without a pesticide license to
obtain and use it. Therefore, I concluded that pesticides such as the commercial insecticide used should
have more restrictions imposed on who gets to purchase and use it for the reasons of negatively
affecting non-targeted organisms such as the threatened species, Apis mellifera.