« Tout dire est impossible. Dire le plus possible est possible. Dire ce que d’habitude on tait, et qui cherche à se frayer un, sinon son, chemin, peut-être, s’il s’impose, nécessaire. »
Kostas Axelos, Le jeu du monde, Les Belles Lettres, coll. encre marine, Paris, 2018, p.116
What influence does the environment have on our behaviour? To what extent does long-term exposure to hostile environments threaten our cognitive functions? What are the limits of cellular resilience to toxic bioaccumulation? What is a “healthy” environment?
These questions represent the main interests of our laboratory. To answer them, we chose to study the honeybee societies of Apis mellifera. Because the cognitive abilities of honeybees have largely evolved to interact with the environment, because they memorize the collection places of their resources, because they bring back these resources into the hive, because they are amongst the non-targeted species affected by pesticides, honeybees constitute major witnesses and unique biomonitoring species to fundamentally understand the complexity but above all the limitation of the adaptation mechanisms put in place to face environmental changes.