12 ms·

Mystery Malady Kills More Bees, Heightening Worry on Farms

345 points by donohoe 14y ago

L0j1k 14y ago
"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.
- balanceiskey15 14y ago
  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.
  - lazyjones 14y ago
    GM crops are being blamed by many scientists: http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/collapsing-colonies-are-gm-crops-killing-bees-a-473166.html http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/collapsing-colonie... Monsanto is the biggest player in that field (by far, I think).
    - robbiep 14y ago
      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
      - antiterra 14y ago
        > But GM crops aren't bee pollinated, they're wind pollinated. Bees forage in corn. That means they are exposed to and possibly affected by GMO Bt-Corn pollen endotoxins and the neonics they treat the corn with.
        rafcavallaro 14y ago
        Bees are fed High Fructose Corn Syrup from corn treated with neonicotinoid pesticides and that low exposure, over time is killing hives: http://stream.loe.org/images/120406/Lu%20final%20proof.pdf http://stream.loe.org/images/120406/Lu%20final%20proof.pdf
        randomdata 14y ago
        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?
      - cmiles74 14y ago
        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.
    - ak217 14y ago
      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.
      - lazyjones 14y ago
        > GM crops (in general, not limited to roundup) allow a dramatic reduction in pesticide use so the propaganda goes ... In fact, the opposite happens: http://earthopensource.org/index.php/5-gm-crops-impacts-on-the-farm-and-environment/5-2-myth-gm-crops-decrease-pesticide-use http://earthopensource.org/index.php/5-gm-crops-impacts-on-t... http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/10/02/us-usa-study-pesticides-idUSBRE89100X20121002 http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/10/02/us-usa-study-pesti... The way to reduce pesticide use is organic farming.
        ak217 14y ago
        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-of-benbrooks-pesticide-use-study-super-weeds.html 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.
        lazyjones 14y ago
        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."
  - L0j1k 14y ago
    Certainly. The wikipedia page is a pretty good place to start (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pesticide_toxicity_to_bees 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...
  - throwaway09832 14y ago
    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-for-bee-deaths-so-monsanto-buys-it.html http://www.care2.com/causes/research-firm-blames-monsanto-fo... http://www.huffingtonpost.com/richard-schiffman/the-fox-monsanto-buys-the_b_1470878.html http://www.huffingtonpost.com/richard-schiffman/the-fox-mons...
    - jen_h 14y ago
      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. :/
  - criley 14y ago
    From Wikipedia: "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] Emphasis mine. [14] http://www.sierraclub.org/biotech/whatsnew/whatsnew_2007-03-21.asp http://www.sierraclub.org/biotech/whatsnew/whatsnew_2007-03-... [15] http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/collapsing-colonies-are-gm-crops-killing-bees-a-473166.html http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/collapsing-colonie... If someone has a greater understanding than the Wikipedia consensus and the sources to back it, please respond (or update Wikipedia!)
    - L0j1k 14y ago
      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.
      - criley 14y ago
        Wrong thread then, apologies. Still hopefully useful information!
    - Someone 14y ago
      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."
  - jen_h 14y ago
    Two studies are referenced in this Reuters article: http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/03/29/us-science-pesticides-bees-idUSBRE82S12P20120329 http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/03/29/us-science-pestici... 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: http://www.businessweek.com/ap/financialnews/D9Q1M0UO0.htm http://www.businessweek.com/ap/financialnews/D9Q1M0UO0.htm 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.
  - balanceiskey15 14y ago
    Man, I feel daft for never hearing about this before. Thanks for the resources.
- csomar 14y ago
  Do you have real data and researches that back-up your claims?
- _red 14y ago
  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.
  - anigbrowl 14y ago
    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. http://www.snopes.com/politics/business/mpa.asp http://www.snopes.com/politics/business/mpa.asp
- keefe 14y ago
  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.
brador 14y ago
With the new news that they communicate using electrical signals through their wings, could it be EM "noise" from cell towers and wifi?
- L0j1k 14y ago
  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.
  - andreasvc 14y ago
    That's backwards. It's unfortunate that (apparently) our modern farming methods disrupt the natural order of things, in this case pollination.
    - Gravityloss 14y ago
      One could say it's not a case of "fortune". It's like throwing a rock into a crowd and being surprised if someone gets hurt badly.
  - nooneelse 14y ago
    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."
- wcoenen 14y ago
  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. http://www.bris.ac.uk/news/2013/9163.html http://www.bris.ac.uk/news/2013/9163.html
qeorge 14y ago
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".
- abraininavat 14y ago
  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?
  - scott_s 14y ago
    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.
    - peterwwillis 14y ago
      That statement also has no supporting evidence. So no, it's not worth noting. Specifically the statement says one kind of pesticide "could be" an important "contributing factor". It's no smoking gun.
      - deleted 14y ago
        [deleted]
      - DanBC 14y ago
        I submitted a story yesterday: (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5454528 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5454528) There have been calls for some restrictions of neonicitinoid use (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-21277933 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-21277933) but research is ongoing and it's important to take evidence based action. (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-21793365 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-21793365) Being careful with the science is a very different position from 'the science is bunk'.
macu 14y ago
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.
- Blahah 14y ago
  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.
  - macu 14y ago
    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.
sasvari 14y ago
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. [0] http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-21958547 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-21958547
- deleted 14y ago
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- pyre 14y ago
  > Denying that this is not true They're openly admitting to it!
- DangerousPie 14y ago
  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.
eterpstra 14y ago
“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.” Obviously this beekeeper is not from Tennessee.
- sabat 14y ago
  Not to mention the (admittedly off-topic) fact that a shot of whiskey every night is not actually unhealthy.
- jusben1369 14y ago
  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....."
DucktourDreams 14y ago
Plenty of people know why. They're researchers. They've published why. The end of the NYT article blandly states in one sentence: "Some researchers have concluded that neonicotinoids caused extensive die-offs in Germany and France." I don't know how one could still tell the truth without minimizing this any further. This is a great lesson in the Emperor Wearing No Clothes. First Jason Blair, then Tesla Motors, now this: Can we finally deliver the coup de grace to that lumbering, obsolete giant the New York Times? What else do they have to do before people recognize them as the drag on progress that they are?
eterpstra 14y ago
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. http://www.fastcompany.com/1766379/super-bees-could-save-us-food-crisis http://www.fastcompany.com/1766379/super-bees-could-save-us-...
- pessimizer 14y ago
  This is now my Terrifying Alternate Future of the Week.
- twoodfin 14y ago
  That's OK. We'll just import and breed needle snakes to eat the bees.
Lagged2Death 14y ago
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.
youngerdryas 14y ago
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.
robomartin 14y ago
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.
- uvdiv 14y ago
  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.
  - davidw 14y ago
    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.
    - deleted 14y ago
      [deleted]
    - tripzilch 14y ago
      I presume "non rhetorical question" would have been more accurate than "serious question", if I understand uvdiv's point correctly.
- abraininavat 14y ago
  Questioning unsubstantiated claims, appeals to (very questionable) authority, and extreme generalizations doesn't require domain knowledge.
ryguytilidie 14y ago
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.
- Gravityloss 14y ago
  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.
- antiterra 14y ago
  > 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.'
aethertap 14y ago
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. [1] http://www.crownbees.com/category/bee-basics-crownbees/bees-purpose/ http://www.crownbees.com/category/bee-basics-crownbees/bees-...
asynchronous13 14y ago
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.
- podperson 14y ago
  Before bees there were frogs: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decline_in_amphibian_populations http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decline_in_amphibian_population...
- amalag 14y ago
  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.
artuk 14y ago
To bee or not to bee, that is the question!
negativity 14y ago
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. Here's an article from early 2012 in wired: http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/03/neonicotinoids-bee-collapse/ 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-corn-insecticide-425812 http://www.ibtimes.com/bee-colony-collapse-disorder-linked-c...
- maxerickson 14y ago
  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.
bennyg 14y ago
Interesting post by a redditor about the bee collapse: --------------- 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. --------------- http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/wsx2q/after_midnight_when_everyone_is_already_drunk_we/c5g8v4d http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/wsx2q/after_midni...
andrewhyde 14y ago
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9Wachq3IQo http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9Wachq3IQo is a good watch related to a good point / counterpoint.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
FollowSteph3 14y ago
Always follow the money trail...
mratzloff 14y ago
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.
- abrahamsen 14y ago
  Neonicotinoids were banned in Germany in 2008, so we already have a (rather large) control group. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neonicotinoid#Environmental_impact http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neonicotinoid#Environmental_imp...
  - aerique 14y ago
    Unfortunately not much info yet about any results on that page.
lo_fye 14y ago
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?
raphinou 14y ago
Am I the only one to think it is crazy to integrate pesticides in the plants that end up in our food?
- zenon 14y ago
  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.) [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pusztai_affair http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pusztai_affair
- Symmetry 14y ago
  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.
deleted 14y ago
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andyl 14y ago
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.
Charlesmigli 14y ago
Here is an short summary of the article for those who want to catch up the discussion http://tldr.io/tldrs/5155b26accd25bb86000051f/soaring-bee-deaths-in-2012-sound-alarm-on-malady-nytimes-com http://tldr.io/tldrs/5155b26accd25bb86000051f/soaring-bee-de...
Terretta 14y ago
You'd think with 30% to 50% dying each year, at some point we should start to see some fitness selected.
thrownaway2424 14y ago
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.
omd 14y ago
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/29/science/earth/soaring-bee-deaths-in-2012-sound-alarm-on-malady.html?hp&_r=0#h[] http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/29/science/earth/soaring-bee-... 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 FACEBOOK TWITTER GOOGLE+ SAVE E-MAIL SHARE PRINT SINGLE PAGE REPRINTS ¶ 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. Connect With Us on Social Media @nytimesscience on Twitter. Environment Reporters on Twitter Like the science desk on Facebook. Enlarge This Image Jim Wilson/The New York Times Beekeepers with Big Sky Honey worked with hives used to pollinate almond groves in Bakersfield, Calif. Readers’ Comments Share your thoughts. Post a Comment » Read All Comments (101) » ¶ 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. Enlarge This Image Jim Wilson/The New York Times Bees on a honeycomb pulled from a hive at Big Sky Honey. Connect With Us on Social Media @nytimesscience on Twitter. Environment Reporters on Twitter Like the science desk on Facebook. Enlarge This Image Jim Wilson/The New York Times Bill Dahle, the owner, described a startling loss of honeybees last year. Readers’ Comments Share your thoughts. Post a Comment » Read All Comments (101) » 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.’”
omd 14y ago
Stinging rebuke for bee conservers 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 http://www.heraldscotland.com/comment/letters/stinging-rebuke-for-bee-conservers.18271148 http://www.heraldscotland.com/comment/letters/stinging-rebuk...
equalsione 14y ago
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. [1] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1480655/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1480655/
NoPiece 14y ago
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..
begurken 14y ago
One thing missing in this debate is any mention of the precautionary principle. I suspect that this type of problem (in which a large number of factors, none of which cause major problems on their own, combine to cause major problems) will become more common over time as more unintended consequences of our actions interact. Hopefully some group of nations at least bans neonicotinoids for a period. That way, we should be able to make some inferences about whether their removal helps solve the problem.
mhen28605 14y ago
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..

345 points by donohoe 14y ago

L0j1k 14y ago

"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.

balanceiskey15 14y ago
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.
- lazyjones 14y ago
  GM crops are being blamed by many scientists: http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/collapsing-colonies-are-gm-crops-killing-bees-a-473166.html http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/collapsing-colonie... Monsanto is the biggest player in that field (by far, I think).
  - robbiep 14y ago
    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
    - antiterra 14y ago
      > But GM crops aren't bee pollinated, they're wind pollinated. Bees forage in corn. That means they are exposed to and possibly affected by GMO Bt-Corn pollen endotoxins and the neonics they treat the corn with.
      - rafcavallaro 14y ago
        Bees are fed High Fructose Corn Syrup from corn treated with neonicotinoid pesticides and that low exposure, over time is killing hives: http://stream.loe.org/images/120406/Lu%20final%20proof.pdf http://stream.loe.org/images/120406/Lu%20final%20proof.pdf
      - randomdata 14y ago
        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?
    - cmiles74 14y ago
      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.
  - ak217 14y ago
    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.
    - lazyjones 14y ago
      > GM crops (in general, not limited to roundup) allow a dramatic reduction in pesticide use so the propaganda goes ... In fact, the opposite happens: http://earthopensource.org/index.php/5-gm-crops-impacts-on-the-farm-and-environment/5-2-myth-gm-crops-decrease-pesticide-use http://earthopensource.org/index.php/5-gm-crops-impacts-on-t... http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/10/02/us-usa-study-pesticides-idUSBRE89100X20121002 http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/10/02/us-usa-study-pesti... The way to reduce pesticide use is organic farming.
      - ak217 14y ago
        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-of-benbrooks-pesticide-use-study-super-weeds.html 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.
        lazyjones 14y ago
        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."
- L0j1k 14y ago
  Certainly. The wikipedia page is a pretty good place to start (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pesticide_toxicity_to_bees 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...
- throwaway09832 14y ago
  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-for-bee-deaths-so-monsanto-buys-it.html http://www.care2.com/causes/research-firm-blames-monsanto-fo... http://www.huffingtonpost.com/richard-schiffman/the-fox-monsanto-buys-the_b_1470878.html http://www.huffingtonpost.com/richard-schiffman/the-fox-mons...
  - jen_h 14y ago
    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. :/
- criley 14y ago
  From Wikipedia: "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] Emphasis mine. [14] http://www.sierraclub.org/biotech/whatsnew/whatsnew_2007-03-21.asp http://www.sierraclub.org/biotech/whatsnew/whatsnew_2007-03-... [15] http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/collapsing-colonies-are-gm-crops-killing-bees-a-473166.html http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/collapsing-colonie... If someone has a greater understanding than the Wikipedia consensus and the sources to back it, please respond (or update Wikipedia!)
  - L0j1k 14y ago
    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.
    - criley 14y ago
      Wrong thread then, apologies. Still hopefully useful information!
  - Someone 14y ago
    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."
- jen_h 14y ago
  Two studies are referenced in this Reuters article: http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/03/29/us-science-pesticides-bees-idUSBRE82S12P20120329 http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/03/29/us-science-pestici... 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: http://www.businessweek.com/ap/financialnews/D9Q1M0UO0.htm http://www.businessweek.com/ap/financialnews/D9Q1M0UO0.htm 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.
- balanceiskey15 14y ago
  Man, I feel daft for never hearing about this before. Thanks for the resources.
csomar 14y ago
Do you have real data and researches that back-up your claims?
_red 14y ago
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.
- anigbrowl 14y ago
  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. http://www.snopes.com/politics/business/mpa.asp http://www.snopes.com/politics/business/mpa.asp
keefe 14y ago
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.

brador 14y ago

With the new news that they communicate using electrical signals through their wings, could it be EM "noise" from cell towers and wifi?

L0j1k 14y ago
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.
- andreasvc 14y ago
  That's backwards. It's unfortunate that (apparently) our modern farming methods disrupt the natural order of things, in this case pollination.
  - Gravityloss 14y ago
    One could say it's not a case of "fortune". It's like throwing a rock into a crowd and being surprised if someone gets hurt badly.
- nooneelse 14y ago
  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."
wcoenen 14y ago
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. http://www.bris.ac.uk/news/2013/9163.html http://www.bris.ac.uk/news/2013/9163.html

qeorge 14y ago

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".

abraininavat 14y ago
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?
- scott_s 14y ago
  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.
  - peterwwillis 14y ago
    That statement also has no supporting evidence. So no, it's not worth noting. Specifically the statement says one kind of pesticide "could be" an important "contributing factor". It's no smoking gun.
    - deleted 14y ago
      [deleted]
    - DanBC 14y ago
      I submitted a story yesterday: (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5454528 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5454528) There have been calls for some restrictions of neonicitinoid use (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-21277933 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-21277933) but research is ongoing and it's important to take evidence based action. (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-21793365 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-21793365) Being careful with the science is a very different position from 'the science is bunk'.

macu 14y ago

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.

Blahah 14y ago
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.
- macu 14y ago
  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.

sasvari 14y ago

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. [0] http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-21958547 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-21958547

deleted 14y ago
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pyre 14y ago
> Denying that this is not true They're openly admitting to it!
DangerousPie 14y ago
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.

eterpstra 14y ago

“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.” Obviously this beekeeper is not from Tennessee.

sabat 14y ago
Not to mention the (admittedly off-topic) fact that a shot of whiskey every night is not actually unhealthy.
jusben1369 14y ago
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....."

DucktourDreams 14y ago

Plenty of people know why. They're researchers. They've published why. The end of the NYT article blandly states in one sentence: "Some researchers have concluded that neonicotinoids caused extensive die-offs in Germany and France." I don't know how one could still tell the truth without minimizing this any further. This is a great lesson in the Emperor Wearing No Clothes. First Jason Blair, then Tesla Motors, now this: Can we finally deliver the coup de grace to that lumbering, obsolete giant the New York Times? What else do they have to do before people recognize them as the drag on progress that they are?

eterpstra 14y ago

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. http://www.fastcompany.com/1766379/super-bees-could-save-us-food-crisis http://www.fastcompany.com/1766379/super-bees-could-save-us-...

pessimizer 14y ago
This is now my Terrifying Alternate Future of the Week.
twoodfin 14y ago
That's OK. We'll just import and breed needle snakes to eat the bees.

Lagged2Death 14y ago

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.

youngerdryas 14y ago

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.

robomartin 14y ago

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.

uvdiv 14y ago
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.
- davidw 14y ago
  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.
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
  - tripzilch 14y ago
    I presume "non rhetorical question" would have been more accurate than "serious question", if I understand uvdiv's point correctly.
abraininavat 14y ago
Questioning unsubstantiated claims, appeals to (very questionable) authority, and extreme generalizations doesn't require domain knowledge.

ryguytilidie 14y ago

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.

Gravityloss 14y ago
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.
antiterra 14y ago
> 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.'

aethertap 14y ago

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. [1] http://www.crownbees.com/category/bee-basics-crownbees/bees-purpose/ http://www.crownbees.com/category/bee-basics-crownbees/bees-...

asynchronous13 14y ago

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.

podperson 14y ago
Before bees there were frogs: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decline_in_amphibian_populations http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decline_in_amphibian_population...
amalag 14y ago
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.

artuk 14y ago

To bee or not to bee, that is the question!

negativity 14y ago

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. Here's an article from early 2012 in wired: http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/03/neonicotinoids-bee-collapse/ 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-corn-insecticide-425812 http://www.ibtimes.com/bee-colony-collapse-disorder-linked-c...

maxerickson 14y ago
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.

bennyg 14y ago

Interesting post by a redditor about the bee collapse: --------------- 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. --------------- http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/wsx2q/after_midnight_when_everyone_is_already_drunk_we/c5g8v4d http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/wsx2q/after_midni...

andrewhyde 14y ago

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9Wachq3IQo http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9Wachq3IQo is a good watch related to a good point / counterpoint.

deleted 14y ago

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FollowSteph3 14y ago

Always follow the money trail...

mratzloff 14y ago

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.

abrahamsen 14y ago
Neonicotinoids were banned in Germany in 2008, so we already have a (rather large) control group. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neonicotinoid#Environmental_impact http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neonicotinoid#Environmental_imp...
- aerique 14y ago
  Unfortunately not much info yet about any results on that page.

lo_fye 14y ago

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?

raphinou 14y ago

Am I the only one to think it is crazy to integrate pesticides in the plants that end up in our food?

zenon 14y ago
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.) [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pusztai_affair http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pusztai_affair
Symmetry 14y ago
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.

deleted 14y ago

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andyl 14y ago

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.

Charlesmigli 14y ago

Here is an short summary of the article for those who want to catch up the discussion http://tldr.io/tldrs/5155b26accd25bb86000051f/soaring-bee-deaths-in-2012-sound-alarm-on-malady-nytimes-com http://tldr.io/tldrs/5155b26accd25bb86000051f/soaring-bee-de...

Terretta 14y ago

You'd think with 30% to 50% dying each year, at some point we should start to see some fitness selected.

thrownaway2424 14y ago

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.

omd 14y ago

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/29/science/earth/soaring-bee-deaths-in-2012-sound-alarm-on-malady.html?hp&_r=0#h[] http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/29/science/earth/soaring-bee-... 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 FACEBOOK TWITTER GOOGLE+ SAVE E-MAIL SHARE PRINT SINGLE PAGE REPRINTS ¶ 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. Connect With Us on Social Media @nytimesscience on Twitter. Environment Reporters on Twitter Like the science desk on Facebook. Enlarge This Image Jim Wilson/The New York Times Beekeepers with Big Sky Honey worked with hives used to pollinate almond groves in Bakersfield, Calif. Readers’ Comments Share your thoughts. Post a Comment » Read All Comments (101) » ¶ 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. Enlarge This Image Jim Wilson/The New York Times Bees on a honeycomb pulled from a hive at Big Sky Honey. Connect With Us on Social Media @nytimesscience on Twitter. Environment Reporters on Twitter Like the science desk on Facebook. Enlarge This Image Jim Wilson/The New York Times Bill Dahle, the owner, described a startling loss of honeybees last year. Readers’ Comments Share your thoughts. Post a Comment » Read All Comments (101) » 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.’”

omd 14y ago

Stinging rebuke for bee conservers 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 http://www.heraldscotland.com/comment/letters/stinging-rebuke-for-bee-conservers.18271148 http://www.heraldscotland.com/comment/letters/stinging-rebuk...

equalsione 14y ago

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. [1] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1480655/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1480655/

NoPiece 14y ago

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..

begurken 14y ago

One thing missing in this debate is any mention of the precautionary principle. I suspect that this type of problem (in which a large number of factors, none of which cause major problems on their own, combine to cause major problems) will become more common over time as more unintended consequences of our actions interact. Hopefully some group of nations at least bans neonicotinoids for a period. That way, we should be able to make some inferences about whether their removal helps solve the problem.

mhen28605 14y ago

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..