Evolution of novel sorbents for effective clean-up of honeybee matrix in highly toxic insecticide LC/MS/MS analysis

•Highly toxic insecticides (HTIs) were extracted from honeybee matrix.•The clean-up procedure using novel sorbents was evaluated.•The QuEChERS using EMR-lipid followed by LC/MS/MS was effective.•The validated method was successfully applied to determine HTIs in real samples.

Highly toxic insecticides (HTIs) belonging to different chemical groups are dangerous to pollinating organisms, even in sublethal doses. An important objective of this study was to develop a method to determine over fifty HTIs at very low concentrations in the bee matrix. The novelty of this research involved obtaining extract completely free from beewaxes, lipids and proteins using EMR-lipid (enhanced matrix removal-lipid), chitin and Z-Sep+ (zirconium oxide and C18 dual-bonded to silica) as clean-up sorbents. Different parameters, such as weight of bees, extraction solvent, and freezing time were evaluated. Determinations were made using liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry (LC-MS/MS). EMR-lipid allows for removing most of the fatty co-extracts and increases the overall performance of the method by reducing the matrix effects (ME) without significant analyte loss. The established modified QuEChERS method based on 1% acetic acid in acetonitrile extraction followed by EMR-lipid clean-up was validated at three different spiking levels (0.001, 0.01 and 0.1 mg kg−1). Precision, calculated as relative standard deviation (RSD), was below 20%. The proposed method was used to determine sublethal doses of these insecticides in real samples of dead honeybees.

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