Harvard study finds common pesticide kills bees

Here is a petition to the EPA to ask them to ban the sale of neoniconitoid


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Harvard study finds common pesticide kills bees
April 06, 2012 By David Abel


A common pesticide used increasingly in recent years for crops such as corn and soybeans is the probable culprit in the destruction of honeybee colonies around the world, a study released Thursday by researchers at the Harvard School of Public Health has found.

The researchers said they found convincing evidence of the link between the pesticide known as imidacloprid and honeybees abandoning their hives, or colony collapse disorder, which they say began occurring in 2006 on a scale and scope never seen before in the history of the beekeeping industry.

Bees pollinate about one-third of crops in the United States, including fruits, vegetables, nuts, and livestock feed. A widespread loss of bees could be devastating to the nation’s agriculture.

“The significance of bees to agriculture cannot be underestimated,’’ said Alex Lu, associate professor of environmental exposure biology at the Harvard School of Public Health, who estimated bees account for about $15 billion in revenue for the agricultural industry.

“It apparently doesn’t take much of the pesticide to affect the bees,’’ Lu said. “Our experiment included pesticide amounts below what is normally present in the environment.’’

Before 2006, the typical bee colony collapse was between 25 and 30 percent; that figure has doubled since then, said Charles Benbrook, chief scientist of the Organic Center in Boulder, Colo., and former executive director of the National Academy of Sciences Board on Agriculture.

Bees are exposed to the pesticide through nectar from plants or through high-fructose corn syrup, which beekeepers use to feed their bees, the researchers said. Corn grown in the United States has been treated with imidacloprid since 2005.

But officials at Bayer, the German chemical and pharmaceutical company that produces more of the pesticide than any other company in the world, said that the study was flawed and that its findings should be disregarded.

They said imidacloprid is used only on a small amount of the nation’s crops, although they could not provide specific figures, and argued the doses used in Lu’s study were excessive.

“It’s a very effective and safe insecticide, much safer than the products it replaced,’’ said David Fischer, director of environmental toxicology and risk assessment at Bayer CropScience, who said the product has been sold since 1994. “All they have shown is if you feed massive amounts of a toxic insecticide to bees that you can cause mortality.’’ Continue here.

These are my bees and bee mentors

MORE INFO HERE from Scientific American

Makes no sense.

Wik-Bee Leaks: EPA Document Shows It Knowingly Allowed Pesticide That Kills Honey Bees
BY Ariel SchwartzFri Dec 10, 2010

The world honey bee population has plunged in recent years, worrying beekeepers and farmers who know how critical bee pollination is for many crops. A number of theories have popped up as to why the North American honey bee population has declined--electromagnetic radiation, malnutrition, and climate change have all been pinpointed. Now a leaked EPA document reveals that the agency allowed the widespread use of a bee-toxic pesticide, despite warnings from EPA scientists.

The document, which was leaked to a Colorado beekeeper, shows that the EPA has ignored warnings about the use of clothianidin, a pesticide produced by Bayer that mainly is used to pre-treat corn seeds. The pesticide scooped up $262 million in sales in 2009 by farmers, who also use the substance on canola, soy, sugar beets, sunflowers, and wheat, according to Grist.

The leaked document (PDF) was put out in response to Bayer's request to approve use of the pesticide on cotton and mustard. The document invalidates a prior Bayer study that justified the registration of clothianidin on the basis of its safety to honeybees:

Clothianidin’s major risk concern is to nontarget insects (that is, honey bees). Clothianidin is a neonicotinoid insecticide that is both persistent and systemic. Acute toxicity studies to honey bees show that clothianidin is highly toxic on both a contact and an oral basis. Although EFED does not conduct RQ based risk assessments on non-target insects, information from standard tests and field studies, as well as incident reports involving other neonicotinoids insecticides (e.g., imidacloprid) suggest the potential for long-term toxic risk to honey bees and other beneficial insects.

The entire 101-page memo is damning (and worth a read). But the opinion of EPA scientists apparently isn't enough for the agency, which is allowing clothianidin to keep its registration.

Suspicions about clothianidin aren't new; the EPA's Environmental Fate and Effects Division (EFAD) first expressed concern when the pesticide was introduced, in 2003, about the "possibility of toxic exposure to nontarget pollinators [e.g., honeybees] through the translocation of clothianidin residues that result from seed treatment." Clothianidin was still allowed on the market while Bayer worked on a botched toxicity study [PDF], in which test and control fields were planted as close as 968 feet apart.

Clothianidin has already been banned by Germany, France, Italy, and Slovenia for its toxic effects. So why won't the EPA follow? The answer probably has something to do with the American affinity for corn products. But without honey bees, our entire food supply is in trouble.

READ ENTIRE article here

Trouble in the Hive - NYT

By KIRK JOHNSON
Published: October 9, 2010

HUMAN beings and honeybees go way back, probably to some unrecorded, fateful day thousands of years ago when a forager stumbled upon some golden goo in the woods, stuck a finger in to taste, and realized that the bears were on to something good.

These days, the relationship is also big business. Agriculture, especially for crops like almonds, depends heavily on industrial-strength pollination services — itinerant bees and beekeepers for hire, roving from farm to farm, blossom to blossom.

So the stakes and the anxiety were enormous when bees started dying by the millions about four years ago, a phenomenon given the name “colony collapse.” Last week, a team of scientists from academia and the United States Army’s chemical and biological research group announced that they had identified a possible culprit: a combination fungus and virus.

But the naming of a suspect still leaves a swarm of questions about where bees, and people, go from here.

Are colonies still collapsing?

Unfortunately, yes. Dead colonies were reported in Florida in January and California in February, and some bee experts fear that the rate of decline could be as severe as in the initial days of the outbreak, in late 2006.

How badly has the bee population been damaged?

The numbers are rough estimates, but huge by any measure. About 20 percent to 40 percent of the bee colonies in the United States have been destroyed, which adds up to perhaps 50 billion individual bees. Colonies that survive can bounce back in as little as a month or two, but a dark cloud is hiding there too: researchers and beekeepers fear that surviving bees could be disease carriers, leading to further outbreaks.

READ ARTICLE HERE