Honeybee queens prioritize self-protection by transferring pesticides to their eggs.

A honeybee queen, supported by her worker bees, has been found to transfer pesticide contamination to her eggs as a survival strategy, according to a study published in Current Biology by researchers from the University of California, Davis. This process, termed maternal offloading, highlights the lengths to which a queen will go to protect herself from chronic pesticide exposure, marking the first documentation of such behavior in honeybees, as noted by senior author Sascha Nicklisch.