Surfactants are just soap, and their mechanism of action is
mechanical: they will physically remove a membrane, or clog a pore, or whatever.
This is in contrast to insecticides, whose mechanism of action is toxological: they can act on a bug's nervous system.
One is soap, the other is toxin.
What this means is that soaps (surfactants) are much, much safer for the environment because they can be effectively diluted, unlike toxins which can be lethal to intersects even in minute amounts.
So yeah, if some of the soap gets on a bumblebee it might die, but you're not going to get a "one drop of this got in a hive and now everything is dead" effect.
This is in contrast to insecticides, whose mechanism of action is toxological: they can act on a bug's nervous system.
One is soap, the other is toxin.
What this means is that soaps (surfactants) are much, much safer for the environment because they can be effectively diluted, unlike toxins which can be lethal to intersects even in minute amounts.
So yeah, if some of the soap gets on a bumblebee it might die, but you're not going to get a "one drop of this got in a hive and now everything is dead" effect.