The development of new regulatory ecotoxicological test methods with honeybees requires the inclusion of fundamental bee biology and corresponding behavioral processes, to improve the explanatory power of a new method as much as possible. In the RFID homing flight ring-test protocol (Fourrier et al. 2018), the test-substance is administered orally with sugar solutions to groups of ten foragers. Due to methodological reasons of the present protocol, the age and task composition of collected foragers may not be homogenous. As a result, the corresponding food uptake could vary considerably among individual bees and/ or groups. Similarly, group-based food distribution via trophallaxis might not homogenously distribute the feeding solution among individual bees. We tested those critical parameters as follow.
