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

Rebelling Against Massive Use of Pesticides, Brazilians Shift to Organic Foods

SANTA MARIA, Brazil – Every Saturday morning, organic food traders from Santa Maria de Jetibá, a Pomeranian settlement on the mountains of Espírito Santo State, in southeastern Brazil, set up their stalls under a bridge in the beach district. It is Praia da Costa, in Vila Velha, one of the cities that make up the metropolitan region of the capital Vitoria, and they are selling organic products to a loyal clientele who are lucky enough to have the foods brought to their doorstep at a price that’s competitive with non-organic items sold at the supermarket.

Selling organic produce is more than a business choice for these Pomeranians: it is, rather, a health-preservation measure. This ethnic group, which emigrated in the 1840s from a Polish region that used to belong to Germany, chose Santa Maria as one of its mountain settlements. They preserved a dialect that is no longer spoken in Europe and lived in relative isolation for over a century.

Then, some years ago, a high suicide rate in the community called the attention of researchers, who established a link between the deaths and the high use of pesticides in the region – many of which also caused infertility and skin cancer. In response, an organic food movement was born as a local organic certification scheme, called Chão Vivo, in 1999 began stimulating a shift toward organic farming.

One of the reasons that many concerned Brazilians are switching to organic is that the country is also the biggest user of pesticides per capita in the world, an unfortunate distinction Brazil has held since 2008. The situation inspired documentary maker Silvio Tendler to produce O Veneno Está Na Mesa (Poison is On the Table), a film that reveals, among other things, the alarming statistic that Brazil uses 5.1 kilos (11.2 lb) of pesticide per person per year.

In the United States, the equivalent figure is 4.5 pounds per person, according to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). And besides the amount of pesticides, the situation is exacerbated by the fact that chemicals which have been banned in most other countries get dumped in Brazil due to lax legislation and intense lobbying from chemical companies.

Poison-Friendly Policies

According to Moyses Veiga, an environmental consultant who has lived among the Pomeranians and worked for the Chão Vivo organic certification scheme, the deeper story dates back to the 1960s when different governments started to pursue a policy of “modernizing agriculture.”

In 1965, Brazil’s government introduced a credit line called Sistema Nacional de Crédito Rural, which submitted financing for the purchase of agricultural inputs by farmers. In 1975, another program called Programa Nacional de Defensivos Agrícolas streamed funds toward the creation of national companies, as well as to transnational agricultural input companies willing to open branches in Brazil.

“Another factor that boosted the use of pesticides in Brazil was an outdated and loose regulation that was in place until 1989, which made it easier to register hundreds of toxic substances, some of which had already been banned in developed countries,” said Veiga.

Veiga points out that it was in the period between 2001 and 2008 that the sale of pesticides in Brazil reached frightening proportions, and Brazil moved up to the top of the ranking. Agriculture revenue jumped from $ 2 billion to more than $ 7 billion per year in that period. Then, in 2009, Brazil’s pesticide use soared to 1 million applied tons. (Environmentalists in the country say that if smuggled pesticides are additionally factored in, the figure could be as high as 9.5 kg per capita.)

All of this has had a negative impact on human and non-human health as well as the environment, facts that more and more of the population is coming to understand. According to Sérgio Koiffman, a researcher with Fundação Oswaldo Cruz, pesticides are substances designed to destroy certain animal pests whose structure is similar to our own.

“Some of the most serious effects include neoplasms, defects in the central nervous system, while the more subtle problems are the neurological development of a child, changes in kidney [health] and sexual functions, and cancer,” said Koiffman. He added that more recently, researchers have noted that exposure to pesticides during pregnancy affects the fetus as well.

Contamination happens through food or water, he said, and in the case of workers who handle the products directly, symptoms tend to me more acute while consumers develop less progressive, though not less serious, problems. One particular class of pesticides, known as methamidophos, has called the attention of government and researchers in recent years. The pesticide was used for pest control on cotton, peanut, potato, bean, soybean, industrial use tomato, and wheat crops.

The Brazilian Health Surveillance Agency, Anvisa, banned it in 2012 after toxicological tests indicated the pesticide to be a class of poison can cause damages in embryo and fetal development, besides affecting endocrine and the reproductive systems.

“There was no evidence that the product is safe for people’s health,” said Anvisa’s director, José Agenor Álvares.

Due to a high concentration of this class of chemicals in the waterways of Mato Grosso State, where some of Brazil’s largest monocultures are located, post-graduate student Izabela Gutierrez de Arruda felt compelled to look deeper into their effects. Gutierrez developed a biosensor based on enzyme inhibition, which helps farmers measure levels of contamination using a portable and cheap piece equipment.

The good news is that all over Brazil, organic street markets are cropping up to cater to the growing demand for healthy food. With more information circulating on social networks, and increasing awareness of the country’s pesticide abuse problem, organic farmers markets like the one in Vila Velha are on their way to becoming fixture in many Brazilian cities.

The City of Belo Horizonte, one of the country’s largest metropolitan regions, reported an increase of 10 percent in demand for organics in the first half of 2013 compared with the same period last year. Rising demand is likely to boost the share of organic food in Brazil’s agricultural production – which currently stands at only five percent of the total – and hopefully slows down the poisoning of the country with pesticides.

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Rebelling Against Massive Use of Pesticides, Brazilians Shift to Organic Foods

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