Starving hives: Pesticides cause bees to collect 57% less pollen, study says

Reuters / Leonhard Foeger

​Bees exposed to “field-realistic” doses of insecticides gather less than a half the pollen that they normally do, dooming their young to starvation, UK researches have said. While some scientists hailed the findings, pesticide makers remained unimpressed

In a spin-off of their earlier study, a team of British scientists have revealed how the neurotoxic chemicals contained in agricultural neonicotinoids affect the very basic function of the honeybees – the gathering of pollen, or flower nectar.

“Pollen is the only source of protein that bees have, and it is vital for rearing their young. Collecting it is fiddly, slow work for the bees and intoxicated bees become much worse at it. Without much pollen, nests will inevitably struggle,” explained University of Sussex professor Dave Goulson, who has led the study. His comments were made in a statement released alongside the research.

Goulson’s latest paper called “Field realistic doses of pesticide imidacloprid reduce bumblebee pollen foraging efficiency” was published at the end of January in peer-reviewed journal Ecotoxicology.

The scientists exposed some of the studied bees to low doses of imidacloprid and tracked their movement with the help of electronic tags. Unexposed bees were also tracked, and each insect flying out and returning to a hive was weighed to find out the amount of pollen it gathered.

It turned out that bees exposed to the neonicotinoid brought back pollen from only 40 percent of their trips asopposed to 63 percent of useful trips which their “healthy” counterparts undertook.
Intoxicated bees cut the amount of pollen gathered by nearly a third – overall, the comparative study showed that the hives exposed to the pesticide received 57 percent less pollen.

“Even near-infinitesimal doses of these neurotoxins seem to be enough to mess up the ability of bees to gather food. Given the vital importance of bumblebees as pollinators, this is surely a cause for concern,” Hannah Feltham of the University of Stirling, another member of the research team, stated.

For bees themselves, the cut appeared to represent a sharp decline in the amount of food that the hive’s population received.

Feltham believed the study adds “another piece to the jigsaw” of why the bees have been in sharp decline lately.

Three types of controversial neonicotinoids have been temporarily banned in the European Union after the European Food Safety Authority carried out peer review of several studies showing that widely-used pesticides could harm the bees’ populations.

“It is unclear what will happen when the [EU ban] expires, as the agrochemical companies that produce them are in a legal dispute with the EU over their decision. Our new study adds to the weight of evidence for making the ban permanent,” Goulson said.

But the dispute over the role of pesticides in the so-called Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD), or mass extinction of bees, is far from being over, the reaction to the study has shown.

“This is a very important study, because it provides further detail on how bumblebee foraging is made less efficient by exposure to imidacloprid at these levels,” said Lynn Dicks, an ecologist at the University of Cambridge.

However, she then questioned the “field-realistic” dose of chemical used by the UK scientists in their study.

“The [levels in this study], particularly the pollen level, are at the upper end of what is found in the field, and likely to be higher than what bumblebee colonies are actually exposed to, because they don’t feed exclusively on oilseed rape,” Dicks argued.

Pesticide manufacturers appeared to be even more dismissive of the study’s results, comparing it to a practice of force-feeding in laboratory conditions.

“It would appear the bumble bees are essentially force-fed relatively high levels of the pesticide in sugar solutions, rather than allowing them to forage on plants treated with a seed treatment. Real field studies, such as those being initiated this autumn in the UK will give more realistic data on this subject,” Julian Little, a spokesman for major German imidacloprid producer Bayer AG has said.

Whether such open-field tests could provide a more balanced data is another issue the researchers have been arguing over. Some say that properly controlled field trials are difficult to conduct, as neonicotinoids have been widely used and bees range over wide areas to gather pollen.

Source: RT

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Starving hives: Pesticides cause bees to collect 57% less pollen, study says

Honey Bees

Bees Are Actually Just Stressed?

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Bees Are Actually Just Stressed?

Bees Get "Blinded" by Polluted Scents: New Insights into Colony Collapse Disorder

_{Photo: Innotata}

Last winter, roughly a third of commercial bee colonies in the United States died off—a staggering percentage in the already unsustainable population decline first observed in 2006. The rapid global disappearance of bee colonies known as colony collapse disorder (CCD) has serious repercussions for food production worldwide.

“One in three mouthfuls of our food depends on bee pollination,” said Dr. John Bryden, the lead author of a new study funded by the Insect Pollination Initiative. “By understanding the way colonies fail and die, we’ve made a crucial step in being able to link bee declines to pesticides and other factors, such as habitat loss and disease which can all contribute to colony failure.”

Bryden’s research team at Royal Holloway University discovered that exposure to low levels of neonicotinoid pesticides subtly affects the behavior of bees. The pesticide is not directly lethal, but because it’s a neuroactive chemical, it has an obvious effect on the mental state of individuals. The bees become stressed out by the presence of the pesticide, dramatically impeding their ability to properly maintain their hives.

“Exposing bees to pesticides is a bit like adding more and more weight on someone’s shoulders,” explains Bryden. “A person can keep walking normally under a bit of weight, but when it gets too much—they collapse. Similarly, bee colonies can keep growing when bees aren’t too stressed, but if stress levels get too high the colony will eventually fail.”

_{A healthy commercial hive. Photo: Björn Appel}

Pesticides are just one of many threats to healthy bee populations. Earlier this week, a team at the University of Southampton published a study in Scientific Reports about the effect of diesel fumes on bee behavior. Led by Dr. Tracey Newman and Professor Guy Poppy, the team discovered that diesel exhaust can alter the profile of floral odors, which confuses honey bees and reduces their foraging efficiency.

Read More…

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Bees Get "Blinded" by Polluted Scents: New Insights into Colony Collapse Disorder

Scientists confirm: Pesticides kill America’s honey bees

RT

Honey bees are quickly disappearing from the US – a phenomenon that has left scientists baffled. But new research shows that bees exposed to common agricultural chemicals while pollinating US crops are less likely to resist a parasitic infection.

As a result of chemical exposure, honey bees are more likely to succumb to the lethal Nosema ceranae parasite and die from the resulting complications.  

Scientists from the University of Maryland and the US Department of Agriculture on Wednesday published a study that linked chemicals, including fungicides, to the mass die-offs. Scientists have long struggled to find the cause behind the Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD), in which an estimated 10 million beehives at an average value of $ 200 each have been lost since 2006.

Last winter, the honey bee population declined by 31.1 percent, with some beekeepers reporting losses of 90 to 100 percent of their bee populations. Scientists are concerned that “Beemageddon” could cause the collapse of the $ 200 billion agriculture industry, since more than 100 US crops rely on honey bees to pollinate them.

The new findings are key in determining one of the causes of the CCD, but they fail to explain why entire beehives sometimes die at once.

UMD and DOA researchers found that pollen samples in fields ranging from Delaware to Maine contained nine different agricultural chemicals, including fungicides, herbicides, insecticides and miticides. One particular sample even contained 21 different agricultural chemicals. To test their theory, they fed pesticide-ridden pollen samples to healthy bees and then infected them with the parasite. They found that the pesticides hindered the bees’ abilities to resist the infection, thus contributing to their deaths. The fungicide chlorothalonil was particularly damaging, tripling the risks of parasitic infection.

“We don’t think of fungicides as having a negative effect on bees, because they’re not designed to kill insects,” Dennis vanEngelsdorp, the study’s senior author, said in a news release.

He explained that federal regulations restrict the use of insecticides while pollinators are foraging, but noted that “there are no such restrictions on fungicides, so you’ll often see fungicide applications going on while bees are foraging on the crop. The finding suggests that we have to reconsider that policy.”

Bees are declining at such a fast rate that one bad winter could trigger an agricultural disaster. California’s almond crop would be hit particularly hard, since the state supplies 80 percent of the world’s almonds. Pollinating California’s 760,000 acres of almond fields requires 1.5 million out-of-state bee colonies, which makes up 60 percent of the country’s beehives. The CCD is a major threat to this $ 4 billion industry.

Entomologists suspect that a number of other factors also contribute to the CCD, including climate change, habitat destructing and handling practices that expose bees to foreign pathogens. But the effect of agricultural chemicals is particularly alarming, especially since the US does not have laws banning the use of the pesticides that are affecting bee health.

“The pesticide issue in itself is much more complex than we have led to believe,” vanEngelsdorp said. “It’s a lot more complicated than just one product, which means of course the solution does not lie in just banning one class of product.”

http://rt.com/usa/bee-pesticide-scientist-research-600/

Scientists confirm: Pesticides kill America’s honey bees

Scientists confirm: Pesticides kill America’s honey bees

Reuters / Stephane Mahe

Honey bees are quickly disappearing from the US – a phenomenon that has left scientists baffled. But new research shows that bees exposed to common agricultural chemicals while pollinating US crops are less likely to resist a parasitic infection.

As a result of chemical exposure, honey bees are more likely to succumb to the lethal Nosema ceranae parasite and die from the resulting complications.

Scientists from the University of Maryland and the US Department of Agriculture on Wednesday published a study that linked chemicals, including fungicides, to the mass die-offs. Scientists have long struggled to find the cause behind the Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD), in which an estimated 10 million beehives at an average value of $ 200 each have been lost since 2006.

Last winter, the honey bee population declined by 31.1 percent, with some beekeepers reporting losses of 90 to 100 percent of their bee populations. Scientists are concerned that “Beemageddon” could cause the collapse of the $ 200 billion agriculture industry, since more than 100 US crops rely on honey bees to pollinate them.

The new findings are key in determining one of the causes of the CCD, but they fail to explain why entire beehives sometimes die at once.

UMD and DOA researchers found that pollen samples in fields ranging from Delaware to Maine contained nine different agricultural chemicals, including fungicides, herbicides, insecticides and miticides. One particular sample even contained 21 different agricultural chemicals. To test their theory, they fed pesticide-ridden pollen samples to healthy bees and then infected them with the parasite. They found that the pesticides hindered the bees’ abilities to resist the infection, thus contributing to their deaths. The fungicide chlorothalonil was particularly damaging, tripling the risks of parasitic infection.

“We don’t think of fungicides as having a negative effect on bees, because they’re not designed to kill insects,” Dennis vanEngelsdorp, the study’s senior author, said in a news release.

He explained that federal regulations restrict the use of insecticides while pollinators are foraging, but noted that “there are no such restrictions on fungicides, so you’ll often see fungicide applications going on while bees are foraging on the crop. The finding suggests that we have to reconsider that policy.”

Bees are declining at such a fast rate that one bad winter could trigger an agricultural disaster. California’s almond crop would be hit particularly hard, since the state supplies 80 percent of the world’s almonds. Pollinating California’s 760,000 acres of almond fields requires 1.5 million out-of-state bee colonies, which makes up 60 percent of the country’s beehives. The CCD is a major threat to this $ 4 billion industry.

Entomologists suspect that a number of other factors also contribute to the CCD, including climate change, habitat destructing and handling practices that expose bees to foreign pathogens. But the effect of agricultural chemicals is particularly alarming, especially since the US does not have laws banning the use of the pesticides that are affecting bee health.

“The pesticide issue in itself is much more complex than we have led to believe,” vanEngelsdorp said. “It’s a lot more complicated than just one product, which means of course the solution does not lie in just banning one class of product.”

Source: RT

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End the Lie – Independent News

Scientists confirm: Pesticides kill America’s honey bees

Bees learn the electric buzz of flowers

Floral electric fields could join color and fragrance as cues to pollinators

By Susan Milius

Web edition: February 21, 2013

Enlarge

ELECTRIC SIDE

On the right-hand halves of flowers, a dusting of electrically charged particles (color in adjacent rectangle) reveals natural patterns. Bees can sense at least simple patterns in floral electrical charges, new research says.

Credit: D. Clarke et al./Science 2013

Slight electric fields that form around flowers may lure pollinators much as floral colors and fragrances do.

In lab setups, bumblebees learned to distinguish fake flowers by their electrical fields, says sensory biologist Daniel Robert at the University of Bristol in England. Combining an electrical charge with a color helped the bees learn faster, Robert and his colleagues report online February 21 in Science.

Plants, a bit like lightning rods, tend to conduct electrical charges to the ground, Robert says. And bees pick up a positive charge from the atmosphere’s invisible rain of charged particles.

“Anything flying through the air, whether it’s a baseball, 767 jumbo jet, or a bee, acquires a strong positive electrostatic charge due to interaction with air molecules,” says Stephen Buchmann of the University of Arizona in Tucson.

Robert and his colleagues checked whether bees could choose flowers based solely on the electric fields the plants produce. Purple metal disks (encased in plastic so as not to shock bees) stood in for flowers. Half of them, wired for 30 volts, held sips of sugar water. The unwired ones offered a bitter quinine solution that bees don’t like.

Enlarge

MODEL FLOWER

A computer model predicts the electric potential of a typical flower blooming 30 centimeters above the ground (left: dark blue, 0 volts; dark red, 35 volts) and its electric field (right; dark blue, 0 volts per meter; dark red 2,000 volts per meter).

Credit: D. Clarke et al./Science 2013

Bombus terrestris bumblebees learned to chose sweet, wired disks more than 80 percent of the time. When researchers unplugged the wired disks, the bees bumbled, scoring sugar only by chance. 

“The big question is how bees do this,” says Lars Chittka of Queen Mary University of London. Bees bristle with hairs, and he speculates that a charged insect nearing an oppositely charged flower feels the hairs bend.

Electric charges of bees and flowers do interact, Robert confirmed after studying bees visiting real petunias. When a bee landed, and sometimes even before, flower stems registered an electrical surge that didn’t fade until after the bee had buzzed onward.

This surge in electric potential might tip off another passing bee that the flower had just lost nectar to a different visitor, a change that scent or color would not reveal. Roberts says, channeling a petunia: “I’m still pretty and smell nice, but my potential tells you to come back later.”

Variations within a flower’s electric field may even hold clues to where bees should probe for nectar, Robert speculates. Researchers found striking electrical patterns when they wafted positively charged colored aerosol particles over blooms.

“I am blown away,” said Anne Leonard of the University of Nevada, Reno. “I imagine that we’ll all be desperate to spray our flowers down with the aerosol they describe.”

Bumblebees can distinguish at least between simple electrical patterns, Robert says. They learned to fly to disks with a negatively charged bulls-eye ringed with a positive charge instead of to disks producing a uniform field.

Charge patterns can also reinforce other flower advertisements, the researchers found. Bees challenged to learn to distinguish two slightly different shades of green learned faster when researchers paired each shade with a distinctive electric charge.

In the real world, bees face a marketing barrage of combined scents, colors and other cues from flowers. “One open question in behavior is when are such cues used, and when are they ignored,” says Robert Raguso of Cornell University. Pollinators need to find their next meal before they run out of fuel, and if a cue such as humidity or electrical charge can let them make snap judgments to save resources, he predicts bees would pay attention.

---

Suggested Reading

A.S. Leonard and D.R. Papaj. ‘X’ marks the spot: The possible benefits of nectar guides to bees and plants. Functional Ecology. Vol. 25, 2011, p. 1293. doi: 10.1242/jeb.047407.

M. von Arx et al. Floral humidity as a reliable sensory cue for profitability assessment by nectar-foraging hawkmoths. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Vol. 109, June 12, 2012, p. 9471. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1121624109 [Go to]

R. Ehrenberg. Jiminy Cricket! Pollinator caught in the act. Science News Online. Posted Jan.18, 2010. [Go to]

S. Milius. Big study—Selective pollinators are declining. Science News. Vol. 170, July 22, 2006, p. 51. [Go to]

Science News

Bees learn the electric buzz of flowers