The western honey bee, Apis mellifera L., is currently the model specie for pesticide risk
assessment on pollinators with the assumption that the worst-case scenarios for this species are
sufficiently conservative to protect other insect pollinators. However, recent studies have showed
that wild species may be more sensitive to plant protection products, due to differences in biology
and life cycles. Therefore, there is the need to extend the risk assessment within a more ecological
approach, in order to ensure that there are no irreversible effects on non-target organisms and in
the environment. My dissertation aims to expand the risk assessment to other insect pollinators (including wild and
managed pollinators), in order to cover some of the gaps of the current schemes. In this thesis, it
is presented three experiments that cover the early stages of a solitary bee (chapter 1), the
development of molecular tools for early detection of sub-lethal effects (chapter 2) and the
development of protocols to access lethal and sub-lethal effects on other pollinator taxa (Diptera;
chapter 3).