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

UK Spy Agency Allegedly Taps Into Transatlantic Cables To Collect Data, Pays Companies For Cost Of Cooperation

According to the latest set of documents from Edward Snowden that were released by the Guardian today, the Britsh spy agency GCHQ has been tapping into 46 transatlantic fiber-optic cables that carry data between Europe and North America to collect and store email messages, Facebook posts and other information for at least the last 18 months, though the program, code-named “Tempora,” has supposedly been built up over the last five years.

Given what we’ve heard about the NSA and its close relationship to Britain’s GCHQ, this may not come as a total surprise and as the Guardian reports, GCHQ is sharing its information with the NSA.

“It’s not just a U.S. problem. The U.K. has a huge dog in this fight,” Snowden told the Guardian. “They [GCHQ] are worse than the U.S.”

According to this report, about 300 GCHQ and 250 NSA analysts were working on analyzing this data by last May and an unnamed U.K. official argues that they get to work with even more information than the NSA because the program actually “produces larger amounts of metadata than NSA.” By last year, the program was handling 600 million “telephone events” each day and was processing data from 46 of the 200 fibre-optic cables it tapped into.

As with all of these program, the legality of the operation is in doubt, though the 2000 Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (Ripa), the report says, requires the GCHQ to obtain a warrant for the tapping of “defined targets.”

The report also alleges that a number of companies have been “paid for the cost of their co-operation,” but unlike the NSA PRISM leaks, the names of these companies remain under wraps and the companies themselves are forbidden to reveal the existence of this program. They were, however, “obliged” to participate in the program, though it’s obviously not clear if they put up a fight or not.

Sadly, the Guardian did not post the actual documents, so for the time being, we have to take the reporter’s word as to the extend of the program.

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UK Spy Agency Allegedly Taps Into Transatlantic Cables To Collect Data, Pays Companies For Cost Of Cooperation

FBI sharply increases use of Patriot Act provision to collect US citizens" records

Win McNamee/Getty Images

U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, right, and FBI Director Robert Mueller at a news conference on Oct. 11, 2011.

By Michael Isikoff
National Investigative Correspondent, NBC News

The FBI has dramatically increased its use of a controversial provision of the Patriot Act to secretly obtain a vast store of business records of U.S. citizens under President Barack Obama, according to recent Justice Department reports to Congress. The bureau filed 212 requests for such data to a national security court last year – a 1,000-percent increase from the number of such requests four years earlier, the reports show.

The FBI’s increased use of the Patriot Act’s “business records” provision — and the wide ranging scope of its requests — is getting new scrutiny in light of last week’s disclosure that that the provision was used to obtain a top-secret national security order requiring telecommunications companies to turn over records of millions of telephone calls.

Taken together, experts say, those revelations show the government has broadly interpreted the Patriot Act provision as enabling it to collect data not just on specific individuals, but on millions of Americans with no suspected terrorist connections. And it shows that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court  accepted that broad interpretation of the law.

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“That they were using this (provision) to do mass collection of data is definitely the biggest surprise,” said Robert Chesney, a top national security lawyer at the University of Texas Law School. “Most people who followed this closely were not aware they were doing this.  We’ve gone from producing records for a particular investigation to the production of all records for a massive pre-collection database. It’s incredibly sweeping.”  

The Justice Department and FBI did not respond to requests for comment. But in a recent interview with NBC News, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper dismissed the idea that the records were being used to spy on innocent Americans. “The notion that we’re trolling through everyone’s emails and voyeuristically reading them, or listening to everyone’s phone calls is, on its face, absurd,” he said. “We couldn’t do that even if we wanted to.”

But little-noticed statements by FBI Director Robert Mueller in recent years – as well as interviews with former senior law enforcement officials – hint at what Chesney calls a largely unnoticed “sea change” in the way the U.S. government collects data for terrorism and other national security investigations.

Edward Snowden, the man who revealed details of the NSA’s surveillance program, will be making more sensitive information public, according to The Guardian. Meanwhile, the intelligence community is assessing the damage of the information Snowden has leaked. NBC’s Andrea Mitchell reports.

The Patriot Act provision, known as Section 215, allows the FBI to require the production of business records and any other “tangible things” — including “books, records, papers, documents and other items,” for an authorized terrorism or foreign intelligence investigation. The Patriot Act was a broad expansion of law enforcement powers enacted by Congress with overwhelming bipartisan support in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. In addition to Section 215, other provisions expanded the FBI’s power to issue so-called “national security letters,” requiring individuals and business to turn over a more limited set of records without any court order at all. 

In contrast to standard grand jury subpoenas, material obtained under both Section 215 orders and national security letters must be turned over under so-called “gag orders” that forbid the business or institution that receives the order from notifying its customers or publicly referring to the matter.

From the earliest days of the Patriot Act, Section 215 was among the most hotly disputed of its provisions. Critics charged the language – “tangible things” — was so broad that it would even permit the FBI to obtain library and bookstore records to inspect what citizens were reading.

Ashcroft confronted criticism
Largely to tamp down those concerns, then-Attorney General John Ashcroft declassified information about the FBI’s use of the provision in September 2003, saying in a statement that “the number of times Section 215 has been used to date is zero.” Ashcroft added that he was releasing the information “to counter the troubling amount of public distortion and misinformation” about Section 215. 

But in the years since, the FBI’s use of Section 215 quietly exploded, with virtually no public notice or debate. In 2009, as part of an annual report to Congress, the Justice Department reported there had been 21 applications for business records to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) under Section 215 – all of which were granted, though nine were modified by the court. (The reports do not explain how or why the orders were modified.) 

In 2010, the number of requests jumped to 205 (all again granted, with 176 modified.) In the latest report filed on April 30, the department reported there had been 212 such requests in 2012 – all approved by the court, but 200 of them modified.

These sharp increase in the use of Section 215 has drawn little attention until now because the number of national security letters (NSLs) issued by the bureau has been so much greater — 15,229 in 2012. But FBI Director Mueller, in little-noticed written responses to Congress two years ago, explained that the bureau was encountering resistance from telecommunications companies in turning over “electronic communication transaction” records in response to national security letters.

“Beginning in late 2009, certain electronic communications service providers no longer honored NSLs to obtain” records because of what their lawyers cited as “an ambiguity” in the law. (What Mueller didn’t say was this came at a time when all the major telecommunications companies were still facing lawsuits over their cooperation with the government on surveillance programs.) As a result, Mueller said, the FBI had switched over to demanding the same data under Section 215. “This change accounts for a significant increase in the volume of business records requests,” Mueller wrote.

What was not explained at the time, Chesney notes, is that the FBI was using the Section 215 requests to obtain a broad array of records. For example, a top-secret FISC order disclosed last week by the Guardian showed that the FBI had  used a single Section 215 request to direct Verizon  to turn over “all call detail records or telephony metadata’’ of its customers for a three month period, literally millions of records.

Saying they wanted to put an end to “secret law,  eight U.S. senators — led by Sens. Jeff Merkley, D-Ore., and Mike Lee, R-Utah — on Tuesday introduced a bill to require the Justice Department to declassify national security court decisions that have permitted the use of the “business records” provision for such purposes.

That followed a court filing Monday by the American Civil Liberties Union and allied groups asking the surveillance court to release its classified legal opinions question that have allowed the expanded use of Section 215.

The motion, filed “pursuant to the First Amendment,” the ACLU states, and under rules that, in some circumstances, permit petitions to the FISC, also cites statements by two Democratic U.S. senators, Ron Wyden of Oregon and Mark Udall of Colorado, and Obama to justify public disclosure.

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“When the American people find out how their government has secretly interpreted the Patriot Act, they will be stunned and they will be angry,” it quoted Wyden as saying in 2011.

It also cited Obama words after last week’s disclosure of the Verizon order: “I welcome this debate.”

The motion also asks the court to consider the constitutionality of the “gag order” written into Section 215.

“There should be no room for secret law,” said Jameel Jaffer, the ACLU’s deputy legal director, adding that disclosure of the FISC rulings is essential if the debate Obama called for is to take place. “The public has a right to know what limits apply to the government’s surveillance authority, and what safeguards are in place to protect individual privacy.” 

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FBI sharply increases use of Patriot Act provision to collect US citizens" records