The end of the pesticide that's killing bees?

A blockbuster study released this week by the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA), has for the first time labeled the pesticide clothianidin as an "unacceptable" danger to bees.

Scientists have long thought that clothianidin is at least partially to blame for the alarming rate that bees have been dying off in the U.S. - nearly 30% of our bee population, per year, has been lost to so-called colony collapse since 2006.

But the EPA has repeatedly ignored scientists' warnings and Americans' urgings to ban its use, citing lack of evidence.

Now, the EFSA study could be a major breakthrough to convince the EPA to take emergency action, and suspend the use of clothianidin to stop the precipitous decline in global honeybee populations.

I just signed a petition urging the EPA to take action. add you name here to speak out for the bees:

http://act.credoaction.com/campaign/efsa_bees/?r_by=-5582763-F_00CKx&rc=paste1

 

Signed

 

Also signed.

 

Bayer, Monsanto, and other giant pesticide mfgs are lobbying hard against the ban of clothianidin, which is only one of many pesticides being blamed for colony collapse disorder. Please take a moment to sign this petition - your food is at stake.

Additional sites related to our beloved bees.

Help the HoneyBees http://www.helpthehoneybees.com/

Bee Native http://www.beenative.org/

Honey Bee Lives http://www.honeybeelives.org/

The Honey Bee Conservancy http://thehoneybeeconservancy.org/

 

BRUSSELS - The drop in bee populations in Europe prompted the European Commission on Thursday (31 January 2013) to propose a two-year partial ban on three neonicotinoid insecticides.

The EU’s food watchdog European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) issued a report in January linking the pesticides to bee decline across Europe. The chemicals are a class of insecticides that affects the central nervous system of insects, causing paralysis and death.

The report is now under review by experts from each member state with a final decision to be made before March for any proposal on a EU-wide regulation.

France, Slovenia and Italy have already introduced national bans on the neonicotinoids. But both the UK and Germany are reportedly showing some resistance to the idea. German manufacturer Bayer CropSciences makes some of the chemicals found in the pesticide as does Swiss-based Syngenta.

http://euobserver.com/environment/118921

 

Protect Pollinators License Plate

Spring arrived in Virginia with a blast of cold air and a dusting of snow, but in a few weeks, the pollen will have your allergies acting up. Take a minute between sneezes to think about the bees, butterflies, and bats that spread pollen from plant to plant. Pollinators are the ecosystem's unsung heroes.

Did you know that bees are responsible for 1/3 of the food we eat? Unfortunately honeybees and other important pollinators are currently in a state of decline. Pesticides are one culprit, and have become the subject of a lawsuit against EPA. However, other stress factors include climate change and the loss of wild lands. The solutions can include changes in our backyard landscaping as well as agricultural practices.

You can help bring awareness to the importance of pollinators with a beautiful new "Protect Pollinators" license plate for your vehicle in Virginia. The plate design features bumble bees and mason bees, butterflies, a hummingbird and honeybees, as well as Virginia native plants and the Blue Ridge Mountains.

The plates are not yet available through DMV, drivers interested in the new pollinator plates can visit URL="http://pollinatorplates.blogspot.com/p/home.html"]www.pollinatorplates.com [/URL]for instructions to submit an application.

 

Thank you to those who signed.

Here is some more info came out!

Commonly used pesticides are damaging honey bee brains, studies suggest.

Scientists have found that two types of chemicals called neonicotinoids and coumaphos are interfering with the insect's ability to learn and remember.

Experiments revealed that exposure was also lowering brain activity, especially when the two pesticides were used in combination.

The research is detailed in two papers in Nature Communications and the Journal of Experimental Biology.

But a company that makes the substances said laboratory-based studies did not always apply to bees in the wild.

And another report, published by the Defra's Food and Environment Research Agency (Fera), concluded that there was no link between bee health and exposure to neonicotinoids.

The government agency carried out a study looking at bumblebees living on the edges of fields treated with the chemicals.

Falling numbers

Honey bees around the world are facing an uncertain future.

They have been hit with a host of diseases, losses of habitat, and in the US the mysterious Colony Collapse Disorder has caused numbers to plummet.

"It would imply that the bees are able to forage less effectively”
Dr Sally Williamson
Newcastle University

Now researchers are asking whether pesticides are also playing a role in their decline.

To investigate, scientists looked at two common pesticides: neonicotinoids, which are used to control pests on oil seed rape and other crops, and a group of organophosphate chemicals called coumaphos, which are used to kill the Varroa mite, a parasite that attacks the honey bee.

Neonicotinoids are used more commonly in Europe, while coumaphos are more often employed in the United States.

Work carried out by the University of Dundee, in Scotland, revealed that if the pesticides were applied directly to the brains of the pollinators, they caused a loss of brain activity.

Dr Christopher Connolly said: "We found neonicotinoids cause an immediate hyper-activation - so an epileptic type activity - this was proceeded by neuronal inactivation, where the brain goes quiet and cannot communicate any more. The same effects occur when we used organophosphates.

"And if we used them together, the effect was additive, so they added to the toxicity: the effect was greater when both were present."

Another series of laboratory-based experiments, carried out at Newcastle University, examined the behaviour of the bees.

The researchers there found that bees exposed to both pesticides were unable to learn and then remember floral smells associated with a sweet nectar reward - a skill that is essential for bees in search of food.

Dr Sally Williamson said: "It would imply that the bees are able to forage less effectively, they are less able to find and learn and remember and then communicate to their hive mates what the good sources of pollen and nectar are."

'No threat'

She said that companies that are manufacturing the pesticides should take these findings into account when considering the safety of the chemicals.

“Decisions on the use of neonicotinoids must be based on sound scientific evidence”
Ian Boyd, Defra

She explained: "At the moment, the initial tests for bee toxicity are giving the bees an acute dose and then watching them to see if they die.

"But because bees do these complex learning tasks, they are very social animals and they have a complex behavioural repertoire, they don't need to be killed outright in order not to be affected."

The European Commission recently called for a temporary moratorium on the use of neonicotinoids after a report by the European Food Safety Authority concluded that they posed a high acute risk to pollinators.

But 14 out of the 27 EU nations - including the UK and Germany - opposed the ban, and the proposal has now been delayed.

Ian Boyd, chief scientist at Defra, said: "Decisions on the use of neonicotinoids must be based on sound scientific evidence."

He said that the results of the Fera bumblebee study suggested that the extent of the impact might not be as high as some studies had suggested - and called for "further data based on more realistic field trials is required".

Dr Julian Little, communications and government affairs manager at Bayer Crop Science Limited, which makes some of the pesticides, said the findings of laboratory-based studies should not be automatically extrapolated to the field.

"If you take an insecticide and you give it directly to an insect, I can guarantee that you will have an effect - I am not at all surprised that this is what you will see," he explained.

"What is really important is seeing what happens in real situations - in real fields, in real bee colonies, in real bee hives, with real bee keepers."

 

Re:Mystery Malady Kills More Bees, Heightening Worry on Farms

March 28, 2013
Mystery Malady Kills More Bees, Heightening Worry on Farms
By MICHAEL WINES

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.

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.

Bee shortages pushed the cost to farmers of renting bees to $200 per hive at times, 20 percent above normal. That, too, may translate into higher prices for food.

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.

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.’”

 

Beware Neonicotinoid Brand Names

"If you are spraying neonicotinoids on your garden or plants you're killing your bees, butterflies (Monarchs are on a severe decline), beetles and flies. And unfortunately the bees, butterflies and other pollinators don’t seem to be bouncing back as well as the Potato Beetle."

And just for good measure MONSANTO has patents for coating their GMO proprietary seeds with neonicotinoids!

Some of the brand names neonicotinoids are sold as:

Clothianidin: Poncho

Imidacloprid: Admire, Advantage (flea & tick for dogs), Confidor, Goucho, Marathon, Merit, Premeir, Provado, Bayer Advanced, Rose Defense

Thiamethoxam: Actara, Crusier, Platinum

Platinum, Helix, Meridian, Centric, Flagship, Arena, Premise, Assail, Intruder, Adjust and Calypso (this list is not all inclusive).

- Products approved for homeowners to use in gardens, lawns, and on ornamental trees have manufacturer-recommended application rates up to 120 times higher than rates approved for agricultural crops.

- Many neonicotinoid pesticides that are sold to homeowners for use on lawns and gardens do not have any mention of the risks of these products to bees, and the label guidance for products used in agriculture is not always clear or consistent.

- Neonicotinoid residues are found in pollen and nectar consumed by pollinators such as bees and butterflies. The residues can reach lethal concentrations in some situations. (Hmmm maybe this is why our monarch butterfly population is dwindling!)

- Neonicotinoids can persist in soil for months or years after a single application. Measurable amounts of residues were found in woody plants up to six years after application.

- Untreated plants may absorb chemical residues left over in the soil from the previous year.

http://digginginthedriftless.com/2012/04/13/are-the-neonicotinoids-you-are-using-in-your-garden-killing-your-bees/

The USDA needs to put a halt to the use of neonicotinoids, both commercial and residential.

If you have any of these products in your garden shed, please think twice before using it and never dispose of it in the garbage.