Neonicotinoids disrupt flight, bioenergetic homeostasis and neurotransmission in honey bees

Neonicotinoid pesticides, alongside other stressors, are driving bee population declines, which threatens biodiversity and global food security. The neural and physiological basis of neonicotinoid-induced behavioral impairments in bees remains unclear, while their diminutive body size and massive eusocial assemblages hinder artificial risk assessment in dynamic environments. Here, we introduce TCA-YOLOv7, an AI-based marker-less panoramic tracking system for automated honey bee monitoring, featuring an enhanced YOLOv7 architecture with a Criss-Cross Attention mechanism for occlusion-resistant detection and a Swin Transformer module to stabilize tracking during irregular movements. Coupled with a multi-camera array utilizing geometric projection and feature matching, the system enables precise and simultaneous 3D trajectory reconstruction of multiple individuals. Our model achieves a detection accuracy of 99.5%, reduces tracking stability error by 68.4%, and attains sub-millimeter spatial precision (3D RMSE), outperforming traditional models. This integrated performance enables high-resolution tracking of key behaviors, such as flying, crawling, and foraging, thereby facilitating in-depth analysis of pesticide-induced behavioral anomalies in complex environments. We show that the honey bee (Apis mellifera L.) exhibited completely different anomalies of paralysis and hyperactivity after exposure to imidacloprid and flupyradifurone which significant alter the flight trajectory and habits. Our findings demonstrate that imidacloprid exhibits substantially higher toxicity to honey bee compared to flupyradifurone, inducing significant reductions in honey bee survival rates and flight capacity at concentrations as low as 40 μg·L⁻¹ and evidenced by behavioral-neuro-biochemical multidimensional data analysis both pesticides suppress the ATP energy supply system in flight muscles and disrupt neurotransmitter transmission, ultimately leading to abnormal behaviors.