Colony Collapse Disorder Linked To Pesticide, High-Fructose Corn Syrup 398
hondo77 writes "Researchers at the Harvard School of Public Health '...have re-created the mysterious Colony Collapse Disorder in several honeybee hives simply by giving them small doses of a popular pesticide, imidacloprid.' This follows recently-reported studies also linked the disorder to neonicotinoid pesticides. What is really interesting is the link to when the disorder started appearing, 2006. 'That mechanism? High-fructose corn syrup. Many bee-keepers have turned to high-fructose corn syrup to feed their bees, which the researchers say did not imperil bees until U.S. corn began to be sprayed with imidacloprid in 2004-2005. A year later was the first outbreak of Colony Collapse Disorder.'"
Explained in Article! (Score:5, Informative)
While the pesticide stuff is pretty obvious, I'm more skeptical about the HFCS link
I know this is Slashdot but if you read the article the explanation becomes very clear. Some bees are fed with HFCS and the syrup itself is derived from crops treated with the pesticide and so it is present in low levels in the syrup and apparently only very low levels are needed to generate CCD.
Re:Still needs more research (Score:5, Informative)
While the pesticide stuff is pretty obvious, I'm more skeptical about the HFCS link, especially if they're claiming its Monstanto GMO corn causing it. Or something silly. Yes, sugar is a poison, and HFCS is vile, but it's going to take another few studies to convince me.
RTFA, there's nothing about Monsanto. In short, it says: "LD50 is no longer enough to assess the toxicity of a substance... neonicotinoid pesticides were found to impact the bees homing ability, so they get lost and die of exhaustion".
Re:Tangential Jab (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Still needs more research (Score:5, Informative)
Many bee-keepers have turned to high-fructose corn syrup to feed their bees, which the researchers say did not imperil bees until U.S. corn began to be sprayed with imidacloprid in 2004-2005
This quote from the summary implies that, rather than GMO corn causing it, it's the pesticide (imidacloprid) that farmers spray on GMO corn because the corn is engineered to resist it. You're right. The pesticide stuff is pretty obvious...if you read it.
Re:Explained in Article! (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Still needs more research (Score:5, Informative)
Monsanto's corn, however, is designed to be pesticide resistant, so farmers can use more pesticide on their corn.
No. Monsanto's corn is designed to be herbicide resistant.
Re:Still needs more research (Score:5, Informative)
Much as I think humanity would be better off with Monsanto collectively put to rot in prison, to be fair the gengineered plants are usually gengineered to be herbicide resistant, not insecticide resistant (which, as insects and plants are very different, they tend to be anyway). Gengineering for insect control tends to be along the avenue of making the plants themselves create toxins (bt corn), which doesn't include neonicotinids yet.
So in this particular case they might not be guilty (unlike other cases of bribery, illegal dumping of toxic waste, etc, etc).
Re:Do bees like tobacco plants? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Explained in Article! (Score:5, Informative)
Which would be a very neat conclusion... if it weren't for the fact that non-HFCS fed bees have also been hit by CCD. It doesn't let the insecticide or even tainted HFCS off the hook, but it does suggest that that it's not so simple as "stop feeding HFCS, bees survive".
Re:Explained in Article! (Score:5, Informative)
Re:What did they feed the bees before HFCS? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Still needs more research (Score:4, Informative)
It's not about HFCS directly. It's the fact that is has trace amounts of a pesticide in it - pesticide that's intended to kill insects!
To be more exact, the type of pesticide is insecticide. Pesticides also include herbicides, fungicides, avacides (birds), rodenticides, nematodacides, bactericides amongst others. (spelling may be slighty off as it's been over 30 years since I studied this and SeaMonkey's spell checker doesn't know most of these terms).
Unfortunately bees are quite sensitive to many insecticides so an amount of insecticide that is needed to be effective against insects that have been developing resistance for many generations is very likely to be toxic to bees.
Re:Still needs more research (Score:4, Informative)
Do you have any experience in this field that would justify your position?
I stopped reading at "sugar is a poison".
Without sugar you wouldn't be reading this.
Re:Explained in Article! (Score:5, Informative)
My immediate questions are, what biochemical mechanism is in place that makes imidacloprid dangerous to bees, and if trace amounts are found in most if not all HFCS, is there any consumption concern for humans who eat food with HFCS in it?
It's a neurotoxin that causes paralysis by disrupting a neurotransmitter that's present in insects but not in warm-blooded animals. It acts on contact.
Re:Explained in Article! (Score:5, Informative)
My immediate questions are, what biochemical mechanism is in place that makes imidacloprid dangerous to bees
The one that was engineered into imidacloprid on purpose: it blocks nicotinoid pathways that primarily exist only in the central nervous systems of insects.
and if trace amounts are found in most if not all HFCS, is there any consumption concern for humans who eat food with HFCS in it?
No. Most modern insecticides were designed not to target mechanisms that are present in the nervous systems of mammals.
Re:EU has non-zero limits (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Isn't this the third or fourth reason for colla (Score:4, Informative)
Nope, there was a correlation between those viruses and funguses and CCD, but no causal like.
They researchers give the bees TINY amounts of this pesticide, and POOF, they can create CCD on demand.
So we know this pesticide causes CCD, and the most likely vector is via HFCS. Bee keepers start feeding bees HFCS in 2005-2006, right when CCD started occurring.
Re:Something Nobody Seems To Be Saying/Asking... (Score:5, Informative)
It's not just "human greed". If you want to keep bees someplace that it gets good-N-cold, feeding them can help them get through the winter. I had bees, a new batch. I took NO honey the first year. We had a nasty winter (not this one just past, but the previous year). Bees did not survive, partly because I did not feed them. Another way to feed them (not sure how much HFCS is in this, but I will check) that a beekeeper friend recommended was to get bulk fondant icing, smear it on wax paper, and just stick that in the top (?) of the hive.
When I was a kid, we kept bees in Florida. That was pretty much dead easy, compared to beekeeping in the Northeast.
Re:Explained in Article! (Score:5, Informative)
According to the article, it took more than a month for the bees to show the CCD effects when they were fed trace amounts.
Also, if the hives are running out of honey in late winter, then the keeper is taking too much honey.
Sorry, that's simply not the case. If a hive produces only enough honey to get itself through the winter, then under your plan, the beekeeper can harvest no honey. That's not viable business. It's quite normal to take most (no, not all) the honey from a hive and augment what the bees have left with sugar water or (more recently) HFCS.
(Yes, I grew up performing these very duties.)
Biochemical mechanism (Score:5, Informative)
It is an irreversible agonist that binds to nicotinic acetylcholine receptors and first activates then blocks them. At high doses it will paralyze muscles. At these low doses it would more likely act by interfering with cognition. Because it is irreversible, it likely has a cumulative effect.
Re:Still needs more research (Score:5, Informative)
I stopped reading at "sugar is a poison".
It is, in the same way that alcohol is a poison. Alcohol can be burned for energy, and in moderation it even has health benefits, but it has to be processed by the liver as a poison.
Sugar consists of glucose and fructose. Fructose is processed by the liver much like alcohol, but the brain isn't affected by fructose so you don't feel the same effects.
Before modern agriculture made sugar so cheap, we primarily got fructose from fruit, which also contained fiber to fill us up and other nutrients. Now sugar is cheap and abundant, and the amount Americans eat per year is staggering, and it almost certainly is the cause of the twin epidemics of diabetes and obesity.
Is Sugar Toxic? [nytimes.com]
Re:Also Linked To Parasites (Score:5, Informative)
It's been linked to about a dozen different things, with each study calling itself "conclusive". It actually starts to get annoying after a while.
Here's the most balanced and detailed [wired.com] article I've seen on this most recent paper so far. In particular, I like Krupke's comments:
I think that's a fair view on the subject, and ties in well with all of the other "conclusive" studies.
It's also worth remembering -- not that it helps anything now -- that honeybees are not native to the US. We only need them because of our extreme use of pesticide-heavy monoculture. Pesticides obviously kill off native pollinators, but monoculture is just as bad -- when everything for dozens of miles around, for the most part, all blooms at once and then there's virtually nothing for the rest of the year, you can't support most types of pollinator populations.