Why are all of you commenting out of complete ignorance and near absolute lack of domain knowledge? Taking sides and making accusations from this frame of reference is just plain wrong.
It's like watching a bunch of bee-keepers engage in a heated debate about a memory leak in your iOS app after reading an article and a Wikipedia page --not one of them being a programmer.
I'd love to hear from bee biologists or someone otherwise scientifically qualified in the domain. Everything else is just noise.
As an aside, I pass through Bakersfield a few times a year on our way to one of our camping destinations. It's interesting to learn that all those beehives are rented and trucked in.
Why are all of you commenting out of complete ignorance and near absolute lack of domain knowledge?
If that's a serious question, because we're pattern-matching this issue with other ones we're emotionally invested in -- archetypical issues of technological progress and ecology. Pre-existing cached narratives.
When the top comment is from someone whose source of information is "his step dad, beekeeper", pointing out the problem as "the pesticides" (although which ones, amongst a broad array of substances, are not specified. All of them?), I'd say it's a very serious question.
Why do you assume this? Maybe you just sit in your mom's basement reading the internet, but my life-long ambition has been farming, i just program computers for the side money. I lease some of my land near Davis to an almond producer, so I happen to know quite a bit about this topic.
Help me understand please. How does owning land and leasing it to an almond farmer result in knowing quite a bit about this problem? I'll grant you that you might be seeing bees die and the effect this might have on crops. Not sure that helps understand the problem.
Are you a biologist? Perhaps a chemist? Virologist? Have you devoted decades to researching bee biology? Have you performed controlled studies on your land or lab to isolate potential vectors, contagions, chemicals and observe their effects over a number of populations and over time? Have you published any research papers based on your work?
Not taking sides other than to say that this is a complex problem that only true science can resolve. You could stop all insecticides and chemical treatments for a few years and see what happens. No need for a PhD on that one, but you have to be willing to make huge sacrifices in terms of crop yields.
Almond-growing depends heavily on bee pollination, so people farming that particular crop are at the sharp end of this problem. Also, UC Davis is academic ground central for research into this problem, and the university researchers have been working closely with farmers in the area for the last few years.
I understand and share your desire for scientific rigor in this discussion, but don't be a prick about it.
Its not a mystery, its the pesticides. Bayer's been leading the "search for the real killer" in an effort that would make OJ Simpson proud.
My step-dad is an avid beekeeper, and an organic urban farmer. Its been "known" for years amongst that community that the collapse is caused by pesticides. Bayer has done an amazing job keeping this labeled a "mystery".
So, while the EPA, USDA, European Food Safety Authority, and leagues of scientists have studied the issue and have not found a single obvious contributing factor -- and actually instead have found evidence to suggest that colony collapse may be caused by a conjunction of many different causes -- you are here announcing to all of us that Its not a mystery, its the pesticides?
Do you have any scientific backing for your claims aside from... your step-dad "knowing" things?
I found these papers through a link trail beginning with a HuffPo article further down the page, but I'm directly linking them here due to relevance.
There seem to be multiple studies indicating that 'neonic' pesticides are responsible for large portions of Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) symptomology [1,2,3]. However, your skepticism is not entirely unjust. Other scientists have linked portions of CCD to various factors involved in industrial bee culture, including artificial insemination of queens and lack of biodiversity.
[1] - Assessment of the environmental exposure of honeybees to particulate matter containing neonicotinoid insecticides coming from corn coated seeds.
It is worth noting that the second paragraph says: But beekeepers and some researchers say there is growing evidence that a powerful new class of pesticides known as neonicotinoids, incorporated into the plants themselves, could be an important factor.
Thing is, while the research is ongoing we are taking the default dangerous route of letting neonicitinoid still be used which seems totally back-to-front to me when the consequences could be so severe.
With new chemicals that have concerns like this I would have thought a "guilty until proven innocent" approach would be more advisable.
Last thing we want is "Oh yes it was that stuff, sorry about that, any bees left?"
It's the second paragraph of a NY Times article. Such things don't tend to embed supporting evidence along with claims, but it's usually a good indicator that there is supporting evidence.
We always fall into the "well there's one powerful interest group that wants this to not come out" Guess what? There are multiple powerful ($billion industries + government) desperate to get to the answer. For that reason I would worry more in this case that we'll try and find a scape goat and not do the deep dive than be the victim of some pesticide cover up.
I don't know what you're talking about regarding the European Food Safety Authority -- everything I read seems to suggest they've pretty much concluded that it's the pesticides.
Really? Where are you reading that exactly? The European Food Safety Authority has done a formal peer review of independent studies and found reason to suggest that neonicotinoids pose a risk to colony survival and development. That is far from a conclusion that Colony Collapse Disorder can be attributed entirely or even mostly to pesticides.
So, while you are technically correct that the EFSA has not in fact "concluded" that the bees are dying because of the pesticides, I cannot help but question whether you merely being overly pedantic, or downright disingenuous. The context in which the EFSA qualified their findings has more to do with the methodology of the studies studied by their study than the discovery of any data to indicate that their conclusions may be invalid. Given that, in response to this study, the E.C. called for a two year ban on some of the pesticides in question, I'm not sure what the point you're trying to make is.
The point is that finding that said pesticides are harmful to bees is not the same as finding that colony collapse disorder is caused solely or primarily by those pesticides. Assuming so may blind you to other important factors. I really don't get what's so hard to understand.
"Regulatory capture occurs when a regulatory agency, created to act in the public interest, instead advances the commercial or special concerns of interest groups that dominate the industry or sector it is charged with regulating. Regulatory capture is a form of government failure, as it can act as an encouragement for firms to produce negative externalities. The agencies are called "captured agencies"."
Well, also be sure to take into account the people that get placed into the leading positions of the EPA, and USDA - typically industry/Monsanto heads. Those organizations are not as altruistic as we would like to believe.
Here's the problem with " you have no proof" mindset: why not apply this to the other side of the equation? Bayer and others want to use chemicals in new places to give us a benefit and them a great benefit. Why shouldn't they be asked to prove that their chemicals will do no harm? The fact is, in our "release it first and wait for absolute 100% proof that it does harm", there are many, many examples of harm being done, even in the pharma industry where the subjects consuming the product are humans, and not several generations away from them.
What's easier to believe?
1) The pesticides used on plants are perfectly safe and there's a much more complex answer to this mystery, or
2) Bayer's self interest prevents them from even caring to do the research to find if the chemicals they use are safe for bees, and the chances are that they are not safe.
Just on the face of it, #2 is far more likely than #1.
We don't have evidence that proves either, though, so I'm going to say we should be conservative and try to mitigate the problem by reigning in the pesticides.
So while the FDA, the ATF, and leagues of scientists from the Institute for Tobacco Studies have not found a singe contributing factor, and instead have found evidence to suggest that lung cancer may be caused by a conjunction of many different causes -- you are here announcing to all of us that It's not a mystery, cigarettes cause lung cancer?
> No single cause of declining bee numbers has been identified. However, several contributing factors have been suggested, acting in combination or separately. _These include the effects of intensive agriculture and pesticide use_, starvation and poor bee nutrition, viruses, attacks by pathogens and invasive species – such as the Varroa mite (Varroa destructor), the Asian hornet (Vespa velutina), the small hive beetle Aethina tumida and the bee mite Tropilaelaps – genetically modified plants, and environmental changes (e.g. habitat fragmentation and loss).
Looks like his step dad is a better source than yours.
Just out of interest, are you paid troll? Shame to see this kind of BS on HN
Just picking another, the researchers did in situ replication of pesticide doses known to be prevalent in working hives, along with control colonies that were untreated. Whats happening is that in the last decade beekeepers largely switched to feeding their colonies High Fructose Corn Syrup from corn treated with neonicotinoid pesticides. Their results:
"15 of 16 imidacloprid- treated hives (94%) were dead across 4 apiaries 23 weeks post imidacloprid dosing. Dead hives were remarkably empty except for stores of food and some pollen left, a resemblance of CCD."
While none of the control hives died.
Their conclusion:
"Data from this in situ study provide convincing evidence that exposure to sub-lethal levels of imidacloprid in HFCS causes honey bees to exhibit symptoms consistent to CCD 23 weeks post imidacloprid dosing. The survival of the control hives managed alongside with the pesticide-treated hives unequivocally augments this conclusion. The observed delayed mortality in honey bees caused by imidacloprid in HFCS is a novel and plausible mechanism for CCD, and should be validated in future studies."
You just supported his point - the EFSA in the text you quoted say there's not any single obvious factor, but some have been suggested. We really don't know the exact cause.
Are you suggesting that supports his step-dad's conclusion that "it's obviously the pesticides"? What could be more clear?
"No single cause of declining bee numbers has been identified"
"Several contributed factors have been suggested"
If that, in your opinion, amounts to "it's obviously the pesticides", then I guess you can think of me as some kind of troll. If, instead, you can understand that making simplistic and overreaching statements like "it's obviously the pesticides" does nothing to help the bees and instead just brings the conversation down to a third grade level, then no, I'm not a troll.
In 2004, The U.S. relaxed restrictions on pesticides, including specific pesticides that were already associated with adverse bee health. Within two years, the reported incidence of CCD rose dramatically. Of course, we all know that correlation is not necessarily causation.
It is nearly impossible for researchers to make a definitive case. Colonies that suffer from CCD have consistently higher concentrations of pesticides than their healthy counterparts. But it's a mix of up to 200 distinct pesticides. If anyone wants to believe that pesticides are not the cause, it's easy to view the available data and say, "see, that's not proof".
In my opinion, one day we'll look back and figure out that bees and bats were our canaries in the coal mine.
It's a good thing Monsanto has purchased Beeologics. They can help us find the real killer since they are showing it is cannot be the pesticides.
Without sarcasm, I am amazed the burden of proof is on studies to show pesticides are UNSAFE. If there is colony collapse disorder and we know they are feeding on pesticide laced fields, shouldn't they have to prove they are not causing it. It is not that the pesticides kill the bees outright, it affects them subtly including their navigation.
Doesn't the independent scientific community agree on the neonicotinoids playing a significant role here [0]? Denying that this is (edit: no not) true on part of the pesticide manufacturers is a pretty big gamble, IMO.
Let's see if the European Commission enforces the ban on this neonicotinoids and what the results of such a ban will be.
I don't see any claims of a "significant role" in that article. They show that these pesticides applied directly to the brain are damaging to the brain. But I didn't find any convincing claims that (a) these pesticides actually get transported to bees' brains in large quantities (they only talk about the amounts inside the entire body) and that (b) this is actually the primary reason and not just one of many contributing factors.
Interesting post by a redditor about the bee collapse:
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Ok, beekeeper, non-vegan here. I've got no horse in the vegan race, but I do know my bees and here is the sad truth: beekeeping is responsible for the decline of world-wide bee population for the last (roughly) 150 years, and for the precipitous decline since 1947.
Beekeeping as it has been done since the widespread adoption of the Langstroth hive has been bad for bees. This is mostly because the hive design has movable frames and opens from the top. These innovations led to highly interventionist beekeeping, and copious fucking with the bees.
The movable frame allows the beekeeper to easily remove, inspect, replace, and swap comb, and led to migratory beekeeping. Bees are now trucked by the tens of thousands of hives across the country with the seasons for the pollination business (which is a bigger than the honey business). The results is that diseases and bee pests move too. The biggest colony killer in the US right now is the Varroa mite, introduced from Asia by humans in 1988, and spread by humans to hives across the country.
The opening from the top destroys the bees' carefully maintained nestduftwarmebingdung, the nest atmosphere. Bees maintain a anti-microbial sauna inside the hive, at a contant tempurature with a complex scent. They can go into fever-mode, raising the temp to kill off infection. The scent helps maintain communication and defenses. Opening the hive destroys the atmosphere. It takes the bees days to reestablish, and is a costly expense of energy they need for foraging, building, and preparing for winter. This weakens the bees, compromising their immune system and leaving them susceptible to infection and invaders.
Then there's honey. Bees spend all season making honey stores so that they can survive the winter. The beekeeper comes along and takes it, then feeds the bees sugar syrup in the winter. This also weakens the bees. Honey is a complex, nutritious bee food. Sugar water is a simple, inadequate food. This is something like you farming all season and stocking up for the winter. You've canned and preserved your veg, and filled your freezer with meat, ready for the hard, unproductive winter. Then someone comes along, takes all your food, and replaces it with Twinkies. You'll survive the winter on Twinkies, but you'll be in pretty bad health come spring. (Although, like the bees with sugar, you'll happily eat the Twinkies, because, yum.)
In the pursuit of larger honey harvest, beekeepers have been artificially increasing the size if the bee's comb cell for about 100 years, by using comb foundation. Bigger cells is thought to mean more honey. So the bees you see today (with some exceptions) are "large-cell" bees, bigger than nature made them. Bigger cells means the workers are too big and the drones are too small (bees left on their own will make different sized cells for each type of bee). This weakens the bees. Some bees bred generations on foundation have lost their ability to create comb on their own.
These weak, immuno-compromised bees are then protected by the beekeepers with pesticides and anti-biotics placed in the hive to deal with the disease and pests that the bees can no longer fight off. This poisons the honey (yum!) and the bees, and breeds resistant pests.
Beekeeping is also dominated by artificial breeding of queens, which eliminates the Darwinian battle of the queens which nature uses to find the strongest queen. This weakens the genetics of the bees, for thousands of generations.
Most, in fact almost all, beekeeping is industrial farming, equivalent to factory farming chickens or cattle. And it has devastated the bees.
There are exceptions: look into vertical top bar hives (which open from the bottom except once a year); chemical-free beekeeping; and spring-harvest honey (taken from the surplus after winter is over).
A note about honey: most of the honey you buy at the grocery store is not. It is heated and filtered and pollen-free, removing the extraordinary health benefits of honey, cut eith corn syrup, beet syrup or other sweeteners, and laced with pesticides and anti-biotics. If you want honey, buy unfiltered, unheated honey, from a beekeeper you know. If you want honey and are concerned about the bees, buy from a beekeeper using Warré topbar hives, doing a surplus harvest.
A note about Colony Collapse Disorder: CCD is not a mystery, as is often reported. CCD is caused by industrial farming pesticides, which destroy bees' navigational abilities, and they can't find their way back to the hive. The whole "it's mysterious" thing is a lie promoted by the chemical companies, primarily Bayer. But in the context of bees weakened by generations of industrial beekeeping, trying to forage on thousands of acres of monoculture crops, having been trucked thousands of miles from their home territory, it is an easy lie to sell.
Beekeeping as it has been done since the widespread adoption of the Langstroth hive [circa 1852] has been bad for bees ... The opening from the top destroys the bees' carefully maintained nestduftwarmebingdung...
This may all be true, but none of it addresses the huge, sudden, new losses that are being reported in this story:
Annual bee losses of 5 percent to 10 percent once were the norm for beekeepers. But after colony collapse disorder surfaced around 2005, the losses approached one-third of all bees, despite beekeepers’ best efforts to ensure their health.
And even though this poster points out that boutique chemical-free beekeeping exists, he doesn't say that such beekeepers have been spared this blight. I don't know if they have in fact suffered less or not, but you'd think that if they had, that would be both something worth mentioning and kind of a huge clue into whatever degree of mystery the collapse disorder really represents.
Adding to your statements: my family has a hive. We harvested it once in 6 months and the colony died about 4 months later. We have put absolutely nothing in the way of chemicals or pesticides in there, we haven't replaced their honey with sugar water (we harvested in summer, gave them ample time to rebuild honey reserves). We never moved them.
And the colony died, randomly. Also happened to some friends' hive. The beekeeper we bought the supplies from hypothesized it was the cold, but we didn't have an unnaturally cold winter and we live in the bay area (not really known for being freezing).
Colony died well after the harvest, though. We harvested about a month after the die-off and got about 8lb of honey (it's a small hive, that was a decent amount).
This is full of half truths, and outright distortion of facts. Like.....
The decline of honey bee since 1947 has nothing to do with the top two points this guys claims. (Removable frames and opening the top)
After WWII, there was a drop off of number of beekeepers. This was due to changing agriculture and the dynamics of the family farm, with a huge surge towards cities and jobs. I will not even try to guess about the down fall of beekeeping due to removable tops, except to say that this is a key point in the narrow minded approach of the Warre hive crowd.
Up till the mid 1980's, beekeeping was healthy and productive. Losing 10% of your hives were considered a bad year. The worst thing that could of happened was getting AFB. (Which by the way was controlled by the removable frame Langstroth hive. AFB prior to removable frames were as high as 50% in some areas, and the basis of most inspection programs years ago. It was a serious matter destroying beekeeping back in it's day. The removable frame (and being able to inspect hives) was why AFB is controlled...even to this day.)
Then we had the introduction of varroa mites, trachea mites, various viral and bacterial issues associated with mites, a new nosema, and now small hive beetle. That does not even scratch the surface in regards to pesticides and the new classes of chemicals out there.
But the Warre crowd sprinkles the conversation with all the key words and talking points, to bash anyone not using a Warre hive, and tailors, or better yet,,,"warps" all information to best fit their ideology.
But how can you claim that the downfall of beekeeping is caused by the Langstroth hive with removable frames and a removable top, and yet claim the root of CCD is chemicals and farming practices. I guess the Warre hive is immune to chemicals. ;)
Anyhow...read the above post. And you can get a sense of the agenda and the promotion of the Warre hive.
> The decline of honey bee since 1947 has nothing to do with the top two points this guys claims. (Removable frames and opening the top)
not agreeing with either :). but he points that this brought a boost in production not the downfall. later he argue it wasn't sustainable in the longer term. but he never says the introduction of that type of hive start the decline of bees.
Reply from a beekeeper friend of mine in Atlanta, in response to the above. He's been keeping bees for about 5 years as a hobby.
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So, IMO this is about half true and a lot of it is conjecture or outright tin-foil-hatism….
What he/she says about the screwing around in the hive is at least partly true. But most experienced beekeepers don't go in the hives more than they need to (I've been in mine [I lost one over the winter] twice since like October). This is typically a new-beekeeper phenomenon (and more new beekeepers are not the problem).
The Langstroth hive does allow for more easily managed beekeeping. Top bar hives are en vogue among the hippie beekeeping crowd - they are more common in third world beekeeping. There are even some advantages to them (they are much easier to build, e.g.). Without the Langstroth, there would probably be very very few backyard beekeepers.
Copious fucking with the bees is definitely part of the problem. The largest issue, which the author points out, is all of the bee migration: going out to pollinate almonds in CA, and then blueberries in MI, etc. This is, as they point out, a MUCH bigger business than honey. Honey is a by-product of pollination business. This is only news to non-beekeepers.
Most of the pesticide issues with bees is from bee contact with things NOT used directly by the beekeeper. Bees are extremely sensitive to pesticides. If you are carrying bees all over the place, especially to farmland, you have a higher chance of them interacting with pesticides. But I have a similar risk if one of my neighbors within, say, a mile, decides to pesticide up a plant that is flowering and my bees happen to be using it for food.
Yes, the chemicals used on bees are much like the chemicals used in, say, poultry or beef production. Preventative and abused by overuse. FWIW, I have all the chemicals, but have never treated mine. Treating when it's appropriate is better than letting the bees get sick or overrun by parasites. There is something called IPM (Integrated Pest Management) advocating this kind of appropriate treatment when necessary, along with other non-chemical preventative management. Beekeeper certifications are based on these methods.
There are guidelines to when chemical treatments can occur to keep it out of the honey flow. I'm pretty sure no matter how poorly these treatments are done, any "poisoned" honey is much healthier than any produce you'd get that's ever had pesticides applied to it (or, say, spraying yourself with DEET). Remember bees are _extremely_ sensitive to toxins.
Varroa are the biggest bee pest since they came to the US in the 80s. Again this would only be news to non-beekeepers. They are here to stay and we're now in the business of managing them…there's no getting rid of them entirely and the statement about how humans are spreading them around is a bit disingenuous -- bees are spreading them around just as well. This is the same story as throughout the biological world where an invasive species is introduced via this new thing we call "global travel".
Cell size might be a contributing factor to some things (like mite populations), so I'll let the author have that one.
The hive I lost this winter was FULL of honey (> 10gal). The bees still froze/starved. They were just too weak eventually to maintain temperature and to get to the honey they did have. Bees, given the proper conditions will produce WAY WAY more honey than they need and in fact, leaving it all on there increases the size of the hive they have to maintain, and can weaken their ability to fight off cold, disease, and intruders. Sometimes nature gets the best of the bees. The long warm fall/winter we had left the bees in a more active mode for longer with less incoming food and then the erratic winter didn't help.
I do feed my bees syrup or pollen patties or a combination of the two maybe twice a year. Usually this is just pre-winter to keep them from eating into the valuable honey right next to the hive body before winter or to give them an easier/quick source of food coming out of winter. This is only a supplemental source of food, the bees are almost entirely eating pollen and honey.
The bit about store honey is fairly accurate. I would hesitate to buy honey from a store if I had a better source. I'm not sure about the whole "benefit" thing -- I tend to believe that honey is mostly a simple sugar that isn't all that good for us and I don't buy into the whole eating honey with pollen will stave off allergies claim. I eat it because I like how it tastes, not because it's a health food. So some of that is also granola/hippie handwringing IMO.
BUT HERE'S WHERE THE BIGGEST BS COMES IN: The author's pontification on the cause of CCD. Even if you know nothing about bees, just reading that paragraph sounds like conspiracy paranoia. There are a lot of stressors on bees: parasites, disease, pesticides, commercial migration, etc. CCD, however, is a very specific condition: In simplest terms, the colony just disappears entirely. The latest findings I read about were pointing to a combination of a fungal infection common in bees called Nosema with a secondary cause, perhaps a bacterial infection like Foulbrood or a viral one like Deformed Wing virus. But the truth is we don't know. It's not a conspiracy of government and big business. Newsflash: Also, the moon landing wasn't faked.
My $0.02. Or well this is long enough to be more like $0.10.
Could you ask your beekeeper friend if other varieties of bees (and wasps as well) are equally sensitive to pesticides as well? In my tiny little urban garden, I'm noticing that there are fewer of other varieties of bees than in past years, and my hunch is that this is due to the chemicals being used to control mosquito populations. Likely this year I am going to pony up for the vial of parasitic wasps in addition to a new crop of mason bees, because the parasites are very much winning now.
Documentation that showed that products labeled as 'honey' were (in a widespread fashion) cut with other sweeteners would be plenty enough to trigger a controversy.
(I am quite ready to believe there are cheaters, but if it is more or less industry practice, it should be easy enough to document it)
That's all about pollen being removed. The only point it talks about cutting honey with other sweeteners is when it mentions that packers independently decided to start testing their suppliers honey.
The guy (in the reddit comment) probably has a point about the filtering and heating (and more broadly, the sourcing and purity of the honey). Tossing it in there with some rabble about other sugars being added makes me wonder if his agenda is one that I would like.
I think you kinda have to put the pieces together. On one part it says:
"By the time the FDA said it realized the Chinese honey was tainted, Smuckers had sold 12,040 cases of individually packed honey to Ritz-Carlton Hotels and Sara Lee said it may have been used in a half-million loaves of bread that were on store shelves.
Eventually, some honey packers became worried about what they were pumping into the plastic bears and jars they were selling. They began using in-house or private labs to test for honey diluted with inexpensive high fructose corn syrup or 13 other illegal sweeteners or for the presence of illegal antibiotics. But even the most sophisticated of these tests would not pinpoint the geographic source of the honey."
And then in several other parts of the article it mentions the tainted Chinese honey that has the pollen footprint removed.
It doesn't come out explicitly to say "Chinese honey is tainted and diluted with artificial sweeteners." Because Chinese honey as pointed out in many parts of the article is run through ultra-filtration techniques to eliminate the only foolproof way of eliminating origin, which is the pollen footprint.
So, it could very well be that some of the honey with sweeteners comes from other places, and not from China. But there seems to be a strong link between Chinese practices and the tainted honey, as the article seems to allude to.
(I readily admit to babysitting this thread a bit)
Anyway, the paragraph just prior to the two you quote makes it pretty clear that the first paragraph you quote is specifically about antibiotics. And, repeating myself, the notion that packers are testing suppliers is not particularly an impeachment of the honey industry.
I replied to Anigbrowl because their reply was rather terse and this article is not the sort of smoking gun I talked about in my first post.
I replied to lilsunnybee because they imply that I was lazy in my reply, and I wasn't.
Vague allusions to the idea that Chinese honey is sketchy is hardly what I had in mind in my original post. That it doesn't come right out and say anything sort of suggests that they don't really have any documentation that it is happening.
While this seems like such a pat answer to a perplexing problem, one that fits the stereotype of "oh it can't be that simple" (not that the beekeeping-OP suggests that it is conclusively the answer)...I wouldn't be surprised if it is a major contribution. It's not unlike the housing-crash in which it was so obvious to those in the business that practices were untenable and risked destroying the entire system, yet no one wanted to be the one left out of the profit margins. According to this redditor, such a mindset is consuming the beekeeping industry.
Such a mindset is consuming this planet, not just the bee industry. Humans, as a race, seem to be unable to forgo short terms gains in exchange for long term sustainability. Particularly if the "term" in "long-term" is out beyond our lifespan. As a society, we are collectively losing the prisoner's dilemma.
Our only hope is that it's actually a false choice and that human innovation can, at some point in the future, cash the checks we're writing with industrial farming, pollution and others without significant harm to our race. The checks will be cashed either way, it's just a question of how painful that will be.
Humans, as individuals, don't think about long-term consequences, sustainability or very far outside their own self-interest.
People live paycheck to paycheck, have children without being prepared, get married without being ready, party every weekend and do things they don't even remember, destroy their bodies with chemicals, treat their fellow man with little to no regard, eat garbage, refuse to exercise, get less than required amount of sleep, sit on the couch and watch TV for consecutive hours at a time.
What are the results? Divorce, suicide, diabetes, cancer, obesity, high blood pressure, heart disease, murder, rape, bankruptcy, debt, family feuds, domestic violence, child abuse, homelessness.
"Consumed the planet". Our current global ecosystem is almost unrecognizably different from that 1000 years ago. Much can be credited to human efforts = most deserts, fish depletion, atmospheric changes, even chemicals in the soil.
> Beekeeping as it has been done since the widespread adoption of the Langstroth hive has been bad for bees.
Actually, without the movable frame system hives wouldn't have much of a chance to survive (At least in our part of Germany). My only hive died this winter, because there was too much honey in it. When the hive cools down to the lower 20°C range in winter the honey crystallizes and becomes too hard for the bees to eat. If done properly, taking the honey and feeding the right syrup (which is not just sugar and water) will keep them alive, as it doesn't crystallize.
I'm quite sure the cell foundation you get in here are of natural size and I have not experienced any problems with the bees building natural combs for drones. Here again the frame system is just great for helping the hive: It allows for the drone combs to be removed after the cells have been sealed, which reduces Varroa, as these prefer drones as hosts.
Another considerable advantage of Langstroth vs. classical skeps: You don't have to kill the hive to get honey/wax. Plus you get pure honey and not some honey - dead bee - crushed larvae - coctail.
Great post! Sorry, but I couldn't resist this, which immediately came to front of mind (just having a little fun on a Friday afternoon)...
Ok, Hacker News regular, non-redditor here. I've got no horse in the reddit race, but I do know my Hacker News and here is the sad truth: reddit is responsible for the decline of the world-wide Hacker News community for the last (roughly) 6 years, and for the precipitous decline since 2012.
Commenting as it has been done since the widespread adoption of the reddit has been bad for Hacker News. This is mostly because the reddit has lots of posers and trolls who talk when they should listen. These newbies led to highly interventionist commenting, and copious fucking with serious community members.
The web-based interface allows the commenter to easily troll, hate, argue, and pontificate, and led to migratory community hopping. Threads are now trucked by the tens of thousands of uniques across the internet with the seasons for the community forum business (which is a bigger than the software business). The results is that viruses and on-line pests move too. The biggest community killer in the US right now is the stepfather, introduced from reddit by trollers in 2012, and spread by anonymous users to communities across the web.
The opening of the web destroys pg's carefully maintained arc application, the HN atmosphere. Posters maintain a anti-microbial discussion inside the forum, at a contant atmosphere with a complex culture. They can go into fever-mode, raising the temp to kill off trollers. The software helps maintain communication and defenses. Opening the community destroys the atmosphere. It takes the moderators days to reestablish, and is a costly expense of energy they need for debugging, troubleshooting, and scaling for eternal September. This weakens the users, compromising their karma system and leaving them susceptible to spammers and hackers.
Then there's language wars. Developers spend all season building tools so that they can survive the bubble burst. The troller comes along and takes it, then feeds the devs javascript on the server. This also weakens the infrastructure. Software is a complex, nutritious business food. Frameworks are simple, inadequate food. This is something like you farming all season and stocking up for the winter. You've canned and preserved your veg, and filled your freezer with meat, ready for the hard, unproductive winter. Then someone comes along, takes all your food, and replaces it with Twinkies. You'll survive the winter on Twinkies, but you'll be in pretty bad health come spring. (Although, like the programmers with frameworks, you'll happily eat the Twinkies, because, yum.)
In the pursuit of larger karma harvest, trollers have been artificially increasing the size if the comment thread for about 4 years, by using friends. Voting rings are thought to mean more karma. So the nicks you see today (with some exceptions) are "karma-whore" users, bigger than the community made them. Higher karma means the users are too big and the lurkers are too small (members left on their own will make different sized comments for each type of thread). This weakens the community. Some programmers bred generations on frameworks have lost their ability to create software on their own.
These weak, immuno-compromised devs are then protected by the community with fluff and drama placed in the forum to deal with the spammers and trollers that the moderators can no longer fight off. This poisons the community (yum!) and the members, and encourages resistant trolls.
Reddit is also dominated by artificial breeding of drama queens, which eliminates the Darwinian battle of the commenters which nature uses to find the strongest poster. This weakens the genetics of the members, for thousands of generations. Most, in fact almost all, web forums are industrial trolling, equivalent to factory trolling Facebook or twitter. And it has devastated the community.
There are exceptions: look into Ask HN posts (which come from legitimate users except once a day); YC related news, and anything from patio11. (taken from the surplus after he's done blogging).
A note about karma: most of the karma you get on Hacker News is not. It is sheeplike and filtered and wisdom-free, removing the extraordinary health benefits of subject matter experts, cut with antecdotes, suppositions or other non sequitors, and laced with drama and bullshit. If you want karma, make unfiltered, unheated obsevations, from a hacker you know. If you want karma and are concerned about voting rings, post when most users are present and trollers are busy at reddit. A note about Community Collapse Disorder: CCD is not a mystery, as is often reported. CCD is caused by industrial trolling and posing, which destroy real hackers' cerebral abilities, and they can't find their way back to the data. The whole "it's mysterious" thing is a lie promoted by the fluff communities, primarily reddit. But in the context of forums weakened by generations of industrial trolling, trying to forage on thousands of threads of popculture posts, having been FTP'd thousands of links from their home url, it is an easy lie to sell.
The NYTimes has left out interesting details. First of all, the California almond crop is almost pathological in its demand for pollination. The entire 800k+ acres must be pollinated pretty much on the same week, or the trees don't set fruit. So, that's weird, and it contributes to hive stress as the bee companies transport literally every beehive on the continent to California at once.
Secondly, California's acres in bearing almonds has more than doubled in ten years. It's a classic agribusiness gold rush, where for some reason the growers are unable to restrain themselves from overproducing a single crop. Almond prices actually peaked in 2005. It takes 5 years for an almond orchard to bear fruit, so all the bonanza-chasers who planted after 2005 are just coming online. This will increase the stress placed on honeybee colonies by increasing the demand for pollination services.
Third. It is an established fact that almond pollination works better in the presence of wild pollinators, which for California almond orchards means native honey bees and bumblebees. These pollinators are also capable of pollinating the crop by themselves, without Apis, except the growers have systematically poisoned them with pesticides and herbicides. Growers of organic almonds (which, by the way, market for 2-3x the price of conventional almonds) will eventually win this game by not poisoning their native pollinators, and because they maintain inter-row habitats for beneficial insects instead of the toxic bare soil that stands between the rows in a conventional orchard.
Gee, seems like there's a lot of rabble rabble rabble going on here.
I have an inclination to disagree with the "No one knows why" part. I was given the firm impression way back in 2011(?) that colony collapse disorder was understood to be linked to neonicotinoid pesticides pretty firmly, albeit through a slightly byzantine mechanism.
1. Farmers grow CORN, and treat the corn with this class of relatively new pesticides.
2. The corn is used to create corn syrup.
3. The corn syrup, being produced on an industrial scale, retains trace amounts of the pesticides, given the slightly imperfect production processes, with loose tolerances that allow for impurities.
4. The corn syrup is fed to the bees, as part of a normal commercial practice, whereby the bees, being transported to unfamiliar territories need a familiar food source while they acclimate to their surroundings and locate reliable local sources of their normal food (flower nectar, etc, etc).
5. The corn farming is not organic, and the bee keeping is not organic. No one cares how the corn is grown because they're feeding it to bees, not humans. Bees don't read labels, and don't sue for damages.
6. Given that the contaminant is a pesticide, specifically designed to inflict death upon insects, bees are uniquely affected by even trace amounts of the toxin, in ways that humans are not. This is not unlike the unintended side-effect DDT has on ospreys.
7. The side-effect has been described loosely as "getting bees so 'drunk' that they get lost, and wander far away from the hive, aimlessly, and fail to return alive."
8. An individual bee inflicted with the trace quantities is capable of recovering to normal health, when the toxin is administered under direct observation, and can be reintroduced to the hive without noticable effects. So, while the dosage is not immediately lethal to the bee, when applied to many or all in a hive, the effect is disruptive to their cooperative behavior. This would explain why the populations dwindle over time, and the bees don't just drop dead.
That's my amateur understanding. Makes sense to me?
Corn syrup on an industrial scale is cheap enough that I don't see much room for it to be cheaper to make a segregated product that is less regulated than the stuff humans end up consuming.
You're totally right. #5 isn't a precise enough statement. Thus the natural conclusion is that corn syrup across the board is simply prone to being a little bit dirty in general. Enough that the bees notice the poison which they are acutely affected by. What I'm driving at, is that the bee keepers are motivated to buy the cheapest corn syrup they can find. Cheaper might imply lower quality, expired, or whatever. The point is, the bee keepers probably aren't performing a taste test, and wouldn't notice the difference by eating it themselves anyway.
Then it just comes down to which growers actually use these new pesticides on corn? And then which corn syrup companies source their corn from these farmers?
Interestingly enough, it looks like I got my bee biology, and bee keeping practices completely wrong in #4. I completely misunderstood the whole honey production/cold winter/hive temperature principle, and the honey harvest/corn syrup substitution thing.
It's outlined in the paper. The hive temperature thing plays a key role, in that the bees feed on the corn syrup while it's cold, during periods when they would normally feed on honey, and stay inside to keep the hive warm. The bees that are intoxicated abandon the hive, and fail to assist in providing the elevated temperature of the hive, leading to the hive's failure.
There's probably more to it than that, but like I said, that's my amateur understanding. I am not a bee keeper.
That low levels of pesticides are bad for bees is entirely believable.
That beekeepers are good enough at and persistent enough about shopping for the relative quality of the syrup they are buying to be relevant is entirely unbelievable.
If pesticide contamination of feed syrup does end up being a big factor, that's great, other types of sugar or not robbing the honey are easy ways to have pollinators.
> That beekeepers are good enough at and persistent enough about shopping for the relative quality of the syrup they are buying to be relevant is entirely unbelievable.
I'm going to paraphrase that statement a bit:
"It's entirely unbelievable that a beekeeper's decisions in corn syrup selection could be relevant to colony collapse disorder."
That seems to operate on the assumption that every 5 gallon bucket of corn syrup is perfectly identical, no matter the supplier.
But I'll shoot down my own assumption that every bee keeper, who has experienced colony collapse disorder affecting their hives, has actually even used corn syrup explicitly as bee feed for their bees. I'm only taking that technique from the premise of the research I read about.
It isn't so much that it must be identical, it is more that it is not easily differentiable. If most buyers are more concerned with "clean enough" than they are with "cleanest", the prices will reflect that.
As I understand it, another contributing factor is 9: the spread of diseases such as parasitic mites. Sometimes a hive weakened by pesticides may be finished off by disease even if it could have survived either alone.
tl;dr for comments:
Half the people strongly believe bees are dying because of pesticides and that chemical companies are doing a good job covering this up.
The other half strongly believe that there is no evidence of pesticides being the problem, and at the same time seem completely unable to believe that a company would cover up facts that would lose them billions of dollars in profits.
Everyone is very passionate, and has at least 1-2 anecdotes, though no real evidence.
If you're an astroturf / PR company, that's often exactly what you're aiming at if you want to deny something. Just muddy the waters.
I'm not saying this is the case here but I've seen it on other issues. It's an easy trap to fall into "we just don't know and there are different voices". In a functioning society, there's a clear channel from the science to the public, via the journalists.
> The other half strongly believe that there is no evidence of pesticides being the problem,
No. The protest to the "we already know, it's pesticides" camp is the concern that colony collapse may be more complicated than a single factor. That doesn't mean that those people believe there couldn't be a corporate cover up or bias in research, but that they are cautious about evidence and the scientific method.
I haven't found a single comment here that says "no, pesticides aren't the problem." Instead, there are plenty of comments saying it's just not clear how significant of a problem it is in relation to colony collapse.
Not only that, but of the people who say "no there is no mystery," not everyone agrees on what this incredibly obvious conclusion is. Is it susceptibility to parasites from neonics, or is it that neonics cause them to lose their sense of direction (the latter seems much less likely from the research I've perused.) Is it just a pervasive environmental effect, is it from bees foraging in Bt-corn, is it from neonic treated corn syrup? Or is it from pesticides that are totally different than neonics?
Do you really think we should stop research into parasites like Apocephalus borealis or Varroa or electromagnetic interference? If not, then it's nowhere near a foregone conclusion, perhaps even a 'mystery.'
It's a nice idea, in theory. Trying to implement it could be a total economic/political nightmare, especially if it was something along the lines of 'hey, we've got a pretty good hunch, revamp your entire method of producing corn/honey/whatever for n years, and let's see. maybe you can have it back afterward.'
It's inevitable that some enterprising beekeeping conglomerate will eventually produce a pesticide/neonic resistant bee. This will be great, until the entire US is covered in one giant honeycomb.
“If you have one shot of whiskey on Thanksgiving and one on the Fourth of July, it’s not going to make any difference. But if you have whiskey every night, 365 days a year, your liver’s gone. It’s the same thing.”
Yeah I could see his point but saw his analogy break down. It was probably better to say "You can have one shot a night and live a long time but if you have one shot on the hour....."
So try something. Ban neonicotinoids in some state like Washington. Monitor progress closely.
The current situation is like having a bug that only shows up in production. At first it wasn't so bad, but we're in day 8 and now half the data is disappearing.
You can't identify the cause without getting in there and trying things. Change. Monitor. Repeat. With a solid lead (and we have one with CCD), it is the quickest way to solve this problem.
Experts say nobody knows. But Mr. Adee, who said he had long scorned environmentalists’ hand-wringing about such issues, said he was starting to wonder whether they had a point.
That's encouraging and frustrating at the same time. Encouraging to see that minds can change; discouraging to see another illustration that it so often requires being screwed over personally to change it.
Since neonicotinoid pesticides were introduced in 1992, 10 million honey-bee colonies have died globally.
Bumblebee and bird populations have crashed in every country where "neonics" are used. Researchers at Stirling University fed bumblebees minute doses of neonicotinoids. The colonies produced 85% fewer queens than usual. Professor Dave Goulson said: " Only queens survive the winter, so reducing their number by 85% means far fewer colonies next year - the long-term effects are likely to be profound."
The Bumble Bee Conservation Trust recently appointed Professor Michael Usher as its chairman. Horticulture Week reported: "Professor Usher said that neonicotinoids, implicated in bee deaths, should continue to be used as insecticides. The former SNH chief scientist argued that neonicotinoids have a place in crop protection, despite damning research released this spring from Stirling University."
Prof Usher was quoted as saying: "We need pollinators but we need our crops too."
The Trust itself seems confused; the pesticide issue is not mentioned on its website, even though Prof Goulson was the trust's founder. The impact of neonicotinoids on bees, birds and wildlife is catastrophic; we are facing ecological Armageddon. Usher must resign, or be sacked; if not, the Trust will be dismissed as mere "greenwash". The trustees must encourage staff to actively campaign against these pesticides. If they don't, the Trust may find its membership sliding to extinction faster than the bumblebees.
Graham White, Friends of the Bees
Philip Chandler, Friends of the Bees
Dr Rosemary Mason, life member, BBCT
Palle Uhd Jepsen, past adviser on nature conservation to the Danish Government and life member, BBCT
While I'm greatly concerned about honey bees and CCD (I raise bees mostly as an effort to help keep them alive), I don't think it's the apocalypse that it's widely made out to be. Mason bees [1] are phenomenal pollinators, and are easily kept. The site linked below is actually dedicated to getting people to keep mason bees as an insurance policy against increasing honey bee fatalities.
They don't make harvestable honey, so they aren't a 100% replacement for the current model. However, they might be able to fill the gap for commercial pollination. They are also not colony insects in the same sense as honey bees, so it's possible that they might be more resistant to large-scale die-offs.
My own hypothesis comes from an experience I had walking down the street one hot summer afternoon. It was a low-traffic country street and yet all along it, every few feet it seemed, there were dead and dying bees. It struck me as a tragedy.
I figured the bees are flying low across the street, because they fly near the ground following their memories and searching for food, and passing back and forth countless times over the street they were bound to get struck.
It could equally have been due to a disease infecting the colony. In our department several labs work with bees, and I spend a fair bit of time in the bee colony room. Sometimes a colony will come in that is just infested with mites or some other parasite, and they start dropping (excuse the pun) like flies.
Yes possibly, although I wouldn't expect so many to drop on the road by coincidence when the fields are far more vast. The particular case could be interpreted from many angles, all speculation without testing the bees. Perhaps it was the sheer heat of the pavement under the sun that chocked them. In any case, the startling number of bees in the grille of my car doesn't call for any thought about disease, mites, or pesticides.
Of course I'm not saying cars are the primary cause, but I believe getting struck by motor vehicles may have a major impact on the population. Considering the number of deer-vehicle collisions and similar, it is at least worth considering.
It reminds me of a lot of complex systems where you really want it to be one thing, that can be easily fixed, but it end up being a lot of different things all need to be addressed.
Like when your site is going down and you hope it is just that you need more memory in your web serverSo you add it and then you run out of DB connections so you fire up some slaves but then you start having disk i/o problems so you go SSD then the network ports are saturated..
The news was that they could detect stable electric fields, probably via electrostatic force on their hairs. That's very different from high frequency radio waves.
Bees are like condors or something, very susceptible to environmental influences. It's tremendously unfortunate (for the understatement of the century) that they are critical to a large part our food supply.
That is a point good enough to deserve an attempt to encapsulate it in a memorable saying. "Don't let your ecological web depend too much on indicator species" doesn't work. How about: "Don't depend on canary eggs when you live in a coal mine."
I don't see one shred of science behind the idea of more beekeepers being bad for bees. What's bad for bees is simple... varroa mites, virus, pesticides, hive beetles, wax moths and diseases like American Foul Brood. Lack of good forage, clean water, stuff like that. Beekeepers bad for bees? What a bunch of horse hockey..
The documentary Colony [1] is worth watching.
It doesn't offer any answers but does offer a good insight into the way the bee pollination business works, and the rather scary impact of CCD.
I don't think it's crazy in principle. The average person eats 1-2 grams of naturally occurring plant pesticides every day. They've always been in our food, and our bodies are pretty good at dealing with them (if anything, we're getting less of them now than historical norms, since we tend to breed low-toxin plants).
In practice, it may be difficult to test the safety of any particular integrated pesticide, for example because of political pressure on the researchers [1].
(But then again, people are allowed to sell foods containing evolutionary novel toxins like gluten, peanut agglutinin, and canavanine, with no safety testing.)
Well, it's not that much more pesticide than was on the surface of the plant before we integrated it. And now it isn't ending up in our rivers, which is a huge environmental win.
The film "resonance: beings of frequency" says it is from RF noise like cellular & wi-fi. We can't hear it, but it is there, and if you put a 2.4Ghz phone beside a hive, the bees vacate. Perhaps higher intensities kill them?
Mystery Malady Kills More Bees, Heightening Worry on Farms
Jim Wilson/The New York Times
A Disastrous Year for Bees: For America’s beekeepers, who have struggled for nearly a decade with a mysterious malady called colony collapse disorder that kills honeybees en masse, this past year was particularly bad.
By MICHAEL WINES
Published: March 28, 2013 101 Comments
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¶ BAKERSFIELD, Calif. — A mysterious malady that has been killing honeybees en masse for several years appears to have expanded drastically in the last year, commercial beekeepers say, wiping out 40 percent or even 50 percent of the hives needed to pollinate many of the nation’s fruits and vegetables.
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Beekeepers with Big Sky Honey worked with hives used to pollinate almond groves in Bakersfield, Calif.
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¶ A conclusive explanation so far has escaped scientists studying the ailment, colony collapse disorder, since it first surfaced around 2005. But beekeepers and some researchers say there is growing evidence that a powerful new class of pesticides known as neonicotinoids, incorporated into the plants themselves, could be an important factor.
¶ The pesticide industry disputes that. But its representatives also say they are open to further studies to clarify what, if anything, is happening.
¶ “They looked so healthy last spring,” said Bill Dahle, 50, who owns Big Sky Honey in Fairview, Mont. “We were so proud of them. Then, about the first of September, they started to fall on their face, to die like crazy. We’ve been doing this 30 years, and we’ve never experienced this kind of loss before.”
¶ In a show of concern, the Environmental Protection Agency recently sent its acting assistant administrator for chemical safety and two top chemical experts here, to the San Joaquin Valley of California, for discussions.
¶ In the valley, where 1.6 million hives of bees just finished pollinating an endless expanse of almond groves, commercial beekeepers who only recently were losing a third of their bees to the disorder say the past year has brought far greater losses.
¶ The federal Agriculture Department is to issue its own assessment in May. But in an interview, the research leader at its Beltsville, Md., bee research laboratory, Jeff Pettis, said he was confident that the death rate would be “much higher than it’s ever been.”
¶ Following a now-familiar pattern, bee deaths rose swiftly last autumn and dwindled as operators moved colonies to faraway farms for the pollination season. Beekeepers say the latest string of deaths has dealt them a heavy blow.
¶ Bret Adee, who is an owner, with his father and brother, of Adee Honey Farms of South Dakota, the nation’s largest beekeeper, described mounting losses.
¶ “We lost 42 percent over the winter. But by the time we came around to pollinate almonds, it was a 55 percent loss,” he said in an interview here this week.
¶ “They looked beautiful in October,” Mr. Adee said, “and in December, they started falling apart, when it got cold.”
¶ Mr. Dahle said he had planned to bring 13,000 beehives from Montana — 31 tractor-trailers full — to work the California almond groves. But by the start of pollination last month, only 3,000 healthy hives remained.
¶ Annual bee losses of 5 percent to 10 percent once were the norm for beekeepers. But after colony collapse disorder surfaced around 2005, the losses approached one-third of all bees, despite beekeepers’ best efforts to ensure their health.
¶ Nor is the impact limited to beekeepers. The Agriculture Department says a quarter of the American diet, from apples to cherries to watermelons to onions, depends on pollination by honeybees. Fewer bees means smaller harvests and higher food prices.
¶ Almonds are a bellwether. Eighty percent of the nation’s almonds grow here, and 80 percent of those are exported, a multibillion-dollar crop crucial to California agriculture. Pollinating up to 800,000 acres, with at least two hives per acre, takes as many as two-thirds of all commercial hives.
¶ This past winter’s die-off sent growers scrambling for enough hives to guarantee a harvest. Chris Moore, a beekeeper in Kountze, Tex., said he had planned to skip the groves after sickness killed 40 percent of his bees and left survivors weakened.
¶ “But California was short, and I got a call in the middle of February that they were desperate for just about anything,” he said. So he sent two truckloads of hives that he normally would not have put to work.
Precisely why last year’s deaths were so great is unclear. Some blame drought in the Midwest, though Mr. Dahle lost nearly 80 percent of his bees despite excellent summer conditions. Others cite bee mites that have become increasingly resistant to pesticides. Still others blame viruses.
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Bees on a honeycomb pulled from a hive at Big Sky Honey.
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But many beekeepers suspect the biggest culprit is the growing soup of pesticides, fungicides and herbicides that are used to control pests.
While each substance has been certified, there has been less study of their combined effects. Nor, many critics say, have scientists sufficiently studied the impact of neonicotinoids, the nicotine-derived pesticide that European regulators implicate in bee deaths.
The explosive growth of neonicotinoids since 2005 has roughly tracked rising bee deaths.
Neonics, as farmers call them, are applied in smaller doses than older pesticides. They are systemic pesticides, often embedded in seeds so that the plant itself carries the chemical that kills insects that feed on it.
Older pesticides could kill bees and other beneficial insects. But while they quickly degraded — often in a matter of days — neonicotinoids persist for weeks and even months. Beekeepers worry that bees carry a summer’s worth of contaminated pollen to hives, where ensuing generations dine on a steady dose of pesticide that, eaten once or twice, might not be dangerous.
“Soybean fields or canola fields or sunflower fields, they all have this systemic insecticide,” Mr. Adee said. “If you have one shot of whiskey on Thanksgiving and one on the Fourth of July, it’s not going to make any difference. But if you have whiskey every night, 365 days a year, your liver’s gone. It’s the same thing.”
Research to date on neonicotinoids “supports the notion that the products are safe and are not contributing in any measurable way to pollinator health concerns,” the president of CropLife America, Jay Vroom, said Wednesday. The group represents more than 90 pesticide producers.
He said the group nevertheless supported further research. “We stand with science and will let science take the regulation of our products in whatever direction science will guide it,” Mr. Vroom said.
A coalition of beekeepers and environmental and consumer groups sued the E.P.A. last week, saying it exceeded its authority by conditionally approving some neonicotinoids. The agency has begun an accelerated review of their impact on bees and other wildlife.
The European Union has proposed to ban their use on crops frequented by bees. Some researchers have concluded that neonicotinoids caused extensive die-offs in Germany and France.
Neonicotinoids are hardly the beekeepers’ only concern. Herbicide use has grown as farmers have adopted crop varieties, from corn to sunflowers, that are genetically modified to survive spraying with weedkillers. Experts say some fungicides have been laced with regulators that keep insects from maturing, a problem some beekeepers have reported.
Eric Mussen, an apiculturist at the University of California, Davis, said analysts had documented about 150 chemical residues in pollen and wax gathered from beehives.
“Where do you start?” Dr. Mussen said. “When you have all these chemicals at a sublethal level, how do they react with each other? What are the consequences?”
Experts say nobody knows. But Mr. Adee, who said he had long scorned environmentalists’ hand-wringing about such issues, said he was starting to wonder whether they had a point.
Of the “environmentalist” label, Mr. Adee said: “I would have been insulted if you had called me that a few years ago. But what you would have called extreme — a light comes on, and you think, ‘These guys really have something. Maybe they were just ahead of the bell curve.’”
"No one knows why" because Monsanto is killing them. Seriously, how many scientists have to declare that bees are being slowly killed by pesticides before we can move ahead in solving this problem? This country is causing me to lose faith in humanity very quickly.
Could you elaborate on this a bit? This is the first time I've heard an accusation against Monsanto in relation to bee death. If you've got some good articles I'd like to read up.
Not only do multiple independent studies point to Monsanto's pesticides, Monsanto is accused of purchasing a bee research company which broke news about their product poisoning bee populations: http://www.care2.com/causes/research-firm-blames-monsanto-fo...
Oh wow, that's horrific...and here I was trying to be positive for once about the acquisition being a goodwill (well, as goodwill as you can get for those guys) effort to start developing bee-safe pesticides/crops. :/
Monsanto itself is actually purchasing companies that develop bee-safe pesticides, so obviously they believe it's a problem, too, even if you'll never hear them come out and say it in so many words:
Also, I have to take issue with the headline here, "No one knows why" doesn't appear to be true at all, even according to the NY Times article itself. Just a lot of hand-waving by those who profit from GMO/pesticides to throw off the trail while they figure out what to do behind the scenes, hoping it's not too late.
But GM crops aren't bee pollinated, they're wind pollinated.
There is so much GM hate by people who have only read or heard soundbites. My experience with GM crops has been that they have resulted in massively reduced levels of pesticide spraying (from an agricultural background) with the side Benicia thet the farmer saves money and insects are spared
Large swaths of the corn crop were wiped out last year, yet the article says that the deaths last year rose dramatically over the previous years. Wouldn't you expect a slight reduction in deaths, if anything, given the events that transpired?
Don't forget that industrial bees are fed corn syrup during the winter. Trace amounts of the toxin (designed to kill insects) are then fed to the bees all winter long.
Ironically, GM crops may wind up bringing bees back from the brink of destruction, in spite of people motivated by uninformed opinions like this.
GM crops (in general, not limited to roundup) allow a dramatic reduction in pesticide use. While they might not improve the predicament of bees being fed pesticide-contaminated corn syrup, they will reduce the overall background levels of pesticides in many hives' environments.
Sorry, that's bullshit. Benbrook's study has been found to have solid points, except for his conclusion that pesticide use has increased - in fact, the data he uses show that it dropped: http://www.bigpictureagriculture.com/2012/10/an-evaluation-o.... The other link is a no-value-added regurgitation of the Benbrook study by an opinionated pseudo-environmentalist website.
The organic label is meaningless, while true organic farming is resource-intensive and unsustainable as a global agricultural strategy.
The most upsetting fact is that most GM opponents simply refuse to acknowledge that genetic modification not only holds great promise for agriculture, but is simply a more efficient way to manipulate crops in ways that we have been doing for tens of thousands of years. This gets us farther from the goal of GM safety and agricultural sustainability, not closer.
Did you even read the conclusion on that amateur blog you cite to attack a widely-acknowledged scientific study?
It says: "At least for the short term, it looks as if more expensive and more hazardous chemical inputs will continue to increase in use for corn, soybeans, and cotton because of pesticide resistance which is growing at an alarming rate."
"Multiple possible causes of CCD have been identified. In 2007, some authorities attributed the problem to biotic factors such as Varroa mites and insect diseases (i.e., pathogens[5] including Nosema apis and Israel acute paralysis virus).[6][7] Other proposed causes include environmental change-related stresses,[8] malnutrition, pesticides (e.g.. neonicotinoids such as clothianidin and imidacloprid[9][10][11]), and migratory beekeeping. other possibilities have included both cell phone radiation[12][13] and genetically modified (GM) crops with pest control characteristics although no evidence has been found to suggest this.[14][15]
It is a fact that people have proposed that aliens make crop circles, but that says nothing about the truth of "aliens make crop circles".
That Wikipedia text quote is full of the former kind of phrase, using "Possible causes have been identified", "other proposed causes", and "other possibilities".
The sentence you emphasized starts with such a phrase:
"other possibilities have included […] genetically modified (GM) crops with pest control characteristics"
And then further weakens the statement with "although no evidence has been found to suggest this.*"
So, if I read that Wikipedia article, I mostly read "we don't know."
I didn't say anything about GM plants. Monsanto is the world's largest producer of pesticides. But yes, humanity is doing so many things to bees that it's hard to really pin it down to one single thing that is killing them off.
Certainly. The wikipedia page is a pretty good place to start (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pesticide_toxicity_to_bees). As mentioned by someone else here, bees are also highly sensitive to RF emission, including our cell towers. Humanity is basically jamming their internal compass and spraying them with chemical warfare agents. It's completely insane that mainstream news is still publishing "we don't know why" articles...
Actually, the politicians know that as well. Which is why BHO signed the "Monsanto Protection Act" this week.
The real thrust of which is that its a limitation on liability to protect them from future monetary claims against their various GMO-Pesticides, etc.
Of course this counteracts the inherent protections that markets give, so instead of being sued out of existence for their mistakes - they are enshrined into law.
Lawsuits take place in courts, not markets. Meanwhile, a little clarification is in order. In general, referring to the President as 'BHO' sets off my bullshit detector and this indicator depressingly reliable.
Monsanto Bee-Sure Pollinators (tm), coming to a farm near you. I wouldn't be surprised if that was going on and I also wouldn't be surprised if it was just because small creatures respond first to small, pervasive pollution. I thought there was something about mites, too.
Every day exotic new compounds are created, used in various products and disposed of by being burned or deposited in landfills with little or no safety testing when we know very well lots of substances are biologically active at a few parts per billion. This scares me much more than climate change.
I have two hives in my back yard (Palo Alto CA). They are doing great! IMHO, the decline of bees is all related to 'industrial bees', wherein vendors stress their bees by trucking them around the country, and expose their bees to pesticides.
I know for a fact that pesticides are super-deadly to bees. Twice I've had colonies wiped out by poison spread by one of my neighbors - it is really sad to watch the dead bees pile up in a mass die-off.
It's like watching a bunch of bee-keepers engage in a heated debate about a memory leak in your iOS app after reading an article and a Wikipedia page --not one of them being a programmer.
I'd love to hear from bee biologists or someone otherwise scientifically qualified in the domain. Everything else is just noise.
As an aside, I pass through Bakersfield a few times a year on our way to one of our camping destinations. It's interesting to learn that all those beehives are rented and trucked in.