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.
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.
Here's an article from early 2012 in wired: http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/03/neonicotinoids-bee...
The long and short of it is:
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?
Here's another reasonable article: http://www.ibtimes.com/bee-colony-collapse-disorder-linked-c...