Molecular Entomology, 2025, Vol.16, No.1, 28-38 http://emtoscipublisher.com/index.php/me 29 Honey bees are highly efficient in spreading pollen, maintaining plant mating and genetic communication, and their pollination behavior and efficiency are often used as one of the indicators for evaluating ecosystem health and agricultural productivity. In addition, the bee genome has been sequenced and its genetic mechanisms have been studied in depth, making bees an ideal model for studying how environmental stresses (such as pesticides) drive evolutionary changes in insects. Because bees are sensitive to environmental changes and easy to monitor, their population dynamics can reflect the status of agricultural ecosystems. Therefore, using bees as model pollinators to explore the impact of agricultural practices on pollinators is not only of theoretical significance, but also helps to provide reference for other pollinating species (Requier et al., 2022). This study aims to summarize the research progress on agricultural practices driving bee evolutionary adaptation in recent years, outline the key driving factors in agricultural practices that may affect pollinator evolution, discuss the role of bees in agricultural ecosystems and the current problems they face, focus on the ecological and genetic mechanisms of agricultural practices driving bees to produce evolutionary responses, and analyze the impact of pesticides, organic agriculture and genetically modified crops on the adaptive evolution of bees through specific cases. This study will also explore how to mitigate the adverse effects of agricultural practices on bee populations through management and protection strategies, and look forward to future research trends in the field of bee evolutionary adaptation and agricultural practices. This study hopes to deepen the understanding of the relationship between agricultural practices and pollinator evolutionary dynamics, and provide necessary guidance for agricultural policy making and pollinator conservation. 2 Key Evolutionary Drivers in Agricultural Practices 2.1 Pesticide use pressure Chemicals such as insecticides, fungicides and herbicides widely used in modern agriculture not only directly cause poisoning and death of pollinators such as bees, but also have hidden effects at sublethal doses, weakening their immunity, navigation and reproductive capabilities (Nicholson et al., 2023; Kita et al., 2024). For example, neonicotinoid insecticides are widely used in seed coating and plant protection due to their high efficiency and broad spectrum, but studies have found that they have strong toxicity and behavioral interference effects on bees, which can lead to impaired learning and memory, decreased disease resistance and abnormal foraging behavior. This type of chronic stress will have a selective effect on the population: resistant individuals may be relatively dominant in the population, thereby promoting changes in the frequency of detoxification-related genes. Experiments by Tsvetkov et al. (2023) have shown that the survival rate of honey bee workers after acute chlorfenapyr exposure is about 38% genetically inherited, and some detoxification genes (such as the CYP9Q family) in surviving bees carry specific mutations that can effectively metabolize pesticides. This finding means that pesticide application is acting as a selection factor for the bee population, with sensitive individuals being eliminated and tolerant individuals relatively increasing, thereby causing changes in the genome composition of the population. In addition to the genetic level, pesticide pressure may also induce behavioral adaptation, such as bees changing their foraging time to avoid the peak of pesticide application, or preferring non-treated flower sources. 2.2 Crop monoculture and resource homogenization Crop monoculture and large-scale intensive farming in agricultural landscapes have led to the homogenization of flower sources and nutritional resources available to pollinators. Large areas of monoculture (such as rapeseed, sunflower, etc.) provide a large amount of single pollen and nectar during the flowering period, but "food deserts" often appear after the flowering period, which puts pollinating insects under the pressure of resource scarcity. Studies have shown that when the nectar source is single and the nutrition is unbalanced, bees have a shorter lifespan, lower immunity, and are more susceptible to pathogens (Branchiccela et al., 2019). This provides a selection advantage for individual bees with stronger nutrient utilization efficiency or stress resistance. Some bee populations may adapt to long-term single-flower source environments by changing their demand for specific nutrients in pollen or improving their nectar storage capacity. Pollinators specializing in specific crops
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MjQ4ODYzNA==