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.'"
This 'science' is for the bees! (Score:3, Funny)
- Big Corn
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.
Re:Also Linked To Parasites (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
While true and (yes) worth remembering—and even with the caveat that you seem to be getting at that we still depend on them whether they're native or not—there's also the matter of the combined dangers of sidelining those other pollinators, so that we may not be able to rely on them even if we get our shit together in terms of food production; and the danger of other pollinators, also part of a complex ecosystem, being subject to the same kinds of stressors and industrial challenges the honeybees suffer. The honeybees serve also as a figurative canary in the coal mine. The quite obvious upshot is that intensive meddling in the name of efficiency or profit might have a profound impact on our survival.
Re:Also Linked To Parasites (Score:4, Insightful)
Oh I get it. This is like when people say that global warming is also linked to natural warming-cooling cycles, but that can't be linked to humans so it's not worth mentioning. Which all sounds great on its face, but the subtext is: pay no attention to what humans are doing (or can do differently) because gee whiz the world is a big complicated place and by golly we can't be responsible for such drastic changes.
It reminds me of a rant I heard last night in an old exchange between Bill Maher and Bill O'reilly (yeah I like to dig through old videos sometimes when I'm bored), where Maher pointed out that the Republican party...
can turn anything into a wash, like they're doing now with Kerry's military record. And Bush has a pretty indefensible military record, especially for someone who's running as a "war president". But they're able to muck up John Kerry's record, spin it, tarnish it to the point where people go, "hey, you know what, there's some crazy stuff about Bush in the war, and there's some crazy stuff about Kerry. It's a wash." (Source [youtube.com])
It may not be your conscious motive, but it's really clear what the tactic is.
From TFA (I know, I know):
In the summer of 2010, the researchers conducted an in situ study in Worcester County, Mass. aimed at replicating how imidacloprid may have caused the CCD outbreak. Over a 23-week period, they monitored bees in four different bee yards; each yard had four hives treated with different levels of imidacloprid and one control hive. After 12 weeks of imidacloprid dosing, all the bees were alive. But after 23 weeks, 15 out of 16 of the imidacloprid-treated hives—94%—had died. Those exposed to the highest levels of the pesticide died first.
The characteristics of the dead hives were consistent with CCD, said Lu; the hives were empty except for food stores, some pollen, and young bees, with few dead bees nearby. When other conditions cause hive collapse—such as disease or pests—many dead bees are typically found inside and outside the affected hives.
That's science. You can't just brush it off with innuendo about whatever mysterious bias it is that apparently enjoins otherwise self-interested people to promote their own species' repression (even though all of the evidence suggests that those using this kind of innuendo and anti-science rhetoric are the ones threatening our species). But since it's science—and therefore falsifiable—if you really want to promote doubt of their findings, you can always research their work and find the errors in it. In the meantime, it may be that there are two contemporary causes of bee colony collapse, and it may be that one of them isn't human-driven. But the other one is. And we have the power to stop it.
Still needs more research (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Still needs more research (Score:5, Insightful)
Do you have any experience in this field that would justify your position? Is there something in the paper that makes you think that this link is not correct? Have you a better idea of what may have caused this?
Re:Still needs more research (Score:5, Funny)
My guess is that he's a Ruby on Rails programmer. That clearly makes him qualified to hold an authoritative opinion on any matter in any field.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Oh, I didn't realize we were calling ROR kids "programmers" now.
Re:Still needs more research (Score:4, Funny)
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: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:Still needs more research (Score:4)
This is exactly the danger in reporting unpublished papers and why Lustig is the only one making the television circuit, despite being in a pretty broad field.
Re: (Score:3)
Robert Lustig's claims are as yet unsubstantiated. He himself admits this.
Do you have a reference where he says that? Because I highly doubt he would use that word, as there is ample evidence that sugar is the problem.
If you mean not yet accepted in mainstream medicine as proven, then I would agree with you, but it's a rather sad state of affairs since there is now much more evidence than there ever was when the medical establishment went on the anti-fat crusade decades ago, back when Yudkin [wikipedia.org] was saying no, it's not the fat, it's the sugar. Americans changed their diet and to low-
Re: (Score:3)
Oxygen is a poison.
Re: (Score:3)
You should have gone with selenium. Arsenic is just a poison in humans.
crap (Score:3)
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A more apt example would have been chlorine or sulfur, each of which has a biological role in human beings but not exactly something one would want to chug.
Re: (Score:3)
You are confused.
It's actually different from what you thought it was.
But the central point of
"Is it poison? Well, that depends on the size of the dose."
remains valid.
Re:Still needs more research (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Still needs more research (Score:5, Insightful)
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:Explained in Article! (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Explained in Article! (Score:5, Insightful)
And stop using those two pesticides.
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Here's the problem. Neonicotinoids went into wide use starting in the 1990s to replace other pesticide families such as organophosphates, which are generally much more indiscriminate in what they hurt and more hazardous to human health. Organophosphates are the same family of chemicals that include VX and sarin. Neonicotinoids are in the same family as nicotine and are analogous to the old technique of spraying plants with tobacco juice to kill insects.
And also, just to make clear, we're not talking abo
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".
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The characteristics of the dead hives were consistent with CCD, said Lu; the hives were empty except for food stores, some pollen, and young bees, with few dead bees nearby. When other conditions cause hive collapse—such as disease or pests—many dead bees are typically found inside and outside the affected hives.
Re:Explained in Article! (Score:5, Interesting)
And even more interesting, in all three studies the pesticide was intentionally fed to the bees in the sugar water; it wasn't collected by the bees. The Harvard study also points out the bee keepers feed their colonies HFCS, which apparently started containing trace amounts of the pesticide about the time they noticed colony collapse become a problem. Kind of sounds like they need to stop feeding HFCS.
But was this food grade HFCS?
Is the FDA on board with pesticide being passed thru at detectable levels in a supposedly simple processed food product?
Re:Explained in Article! (Score:5, Interesting)
But was this food grade HFCS?
Is the FDA on board with pesticide being passed thru at detectable levels in a supposedly simple processed food product?
Welp, farmers are definitely the sort of folks that try to make the best use of anything. "Ah hell, well this batch isn't any good for selling, but I guess I could feed it to the bees..."
Re:Explained in Article! (Score:5, Insightful)
But was this food grade HFCS?
Is the FDA on board with pesticide being passed thru at detectable levels in a supposedly simple processed food product?
Welp, farmers are definitely the sort of folks that try to make the best use of anything. "Ah hell, well this batch isn't any good for selling, but I guess I could feed it to the bees..."
The much more likely scenario would be that the maker of the pesticide lobbied the FDA to make it "acceptable" for the pesticide to appear in non-zero amounts in HFCS. That's how things work in this country.
EU has non-zero limits (Score:3)
Is the FDA on board with pesticide being passed thru at detectable levels in a supposedly simple processed food product?
Very likely yes. This article [wikipedia.org] lays out the european limits for it in food as ranging from 0.02 mg/kg in eggs to 3.0 mg/kg in hops. While this is not proof that the US FDA has a non-zero limit usually Europe tends to be more conservative with food regulations (at least they are with things like growth hormones).
Re:EU has non-zero limits (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Explained in Article! (Score:4, Insightful)
what biochemical mechanism is in place that makes imidacloprid dangerous to bees...
It is an insecticide.
That's usually dangerous to insects.
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: (Score:3)
It's a neurotoxin that causes paralysis by disrupting a neurotransmitter that's present in insects but not in warm-blooded animals.
However that does not mean that it is harmless for us. According to wikipedia [wikipedia.org] it is rated as moderately toxic when ingested by mammals and affects the thyroid of rats and the livers of dogs in sufficiently high concentrations.
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I think this [wikipedia.org] tells it better: it's not that we are immune to it, we are just effected by it by a very large margin:
Specifically, it causes a blockage in a type of neuronal pathway (nicotinergic) that is more abundant in insects than in warm-blooded animals (making the chemical selectively more toxic to insects than warm-blooded animals)
I'm not sure why that is present in that article, and not in the article on the chemical itself?
Re:Explained in Article! (Score:5, Funny)
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.
Does it also affect reptiles and other cold-blooded animals, or just the insect world? I'm just curious because I wonder if we feed this to politicians and lawyers it might solve all the world's problems and result in world peace.
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.
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:Explained in Article! (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Explained in Article! (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Explained in Article! (Score:5, Insightful)
So when did you become a beekeeper, Ion? ;)
It's been long standing practice to supplement food in hives in late winter as it leads to a faster build up of bees before the spring honey flow. It doesn't mean they were stripping out too much.
(Full, disclosure: Yes, I'm "that" Hartree. And I used to help my dad keep bees. Good to run into you on Slashdot!)
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.)
Re:Explained in Article! (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Still needs more research (Score:5, Insightful)
From the summary it sounds like the pesticide is piggybacking on the HFCS produced. The first article is more clear in this, that the problem is the pesticide, not the corn syrup itself.
Monsanto's corn, however, is designed to be pesticide resistant, so farmers can use more pesticide on their corn. It's possible that at low enough dosages colony collapse disorder doesn't occur, but Monsanto's corn allows a much higher dose to be tolerated by the corn.
All in all, this is a pretty reasonable conclusion I think.
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
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Re:Still needs more research (Score:4, Insightful)
The sugar tariffs result from Cuba being a major sugar cane producer. The same right wing that wants no trade at all with Castro wants Cuban sugar that passes through other Carribean nations to be so expensive nobody in the US wants to import any, just to prevent those other Carribean states from even possibly serving as pass throughs for any funds getting through to Cuba.
So in the US we have a right wing that will oppose any science finding that colony collapse has anything to do with ADM, Monsanto, or other Megacorps. Now you point out that the root causes include other right wing policies. That's not going to cause them to rethink their position. THEY can't be the ones responsible for anything bad, so they'll have to double down on blaiming "acts of God", or the Gay Liberal Bees, or something.
Re:Still needs more research (Score:5, Insightful)
Isn't it time to forgive Cuba? I mean, yes they were nasty to us in the 60s but that was ages ago. This embargo is doing more harm than good at this point.
This grudge the US has against them is ridiculous at this point. And we can't even use the excuse "but they're COMMIES!!!" because so are the Chinese and we trade plenty with them!
Re:Still needs more research (Score:5, Interesting)
This is an issue that if you want to actually make a difference on, you should avoid trying to make it a left vs right issue because it isn't. There are just as many left wing politicians who have supported the sugar tariffs as there are right wing politicians who have done so.
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:Still needs more research (Score:4, Interesting)
If you want to blame Big Agriculture, the culprit this time is Bayer, not Monsanto. They're the ones who make imidacloprid. There are plenty of other things to lay at Monsanto's feet without having to point the finger at them this time.
Re: (Score:3)
I stand corrected in that Monsanto's corn is herbicide, not pesticide resistant. I really wish /. had editing so I could add this to my "insightful" post. It looks like blame falls squarely on over-use of pesticides then.
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Herbicide is a subset of pesticide so you're kind of right, just getting mixed up between different types of pesticide. The correct way to state it would be "Monsanto's corn is resistant to some types of herbicide, not insecticides"
Re:Still needs more research (Score:4, Insightful)
Now, I admit that I didn't fully read the article, but I'm pretty sure you're missing something fundamental. Monsanto GMO is not directly a problem. The problem is dumping pesticide on things because the crops have been given GMO resistance.
Gee - feed something with trace amounts of bug killer to bugs and it kills bugs. How did no one think of this earlier???
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: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".
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LD50 has never been a very good method of judging toxicity. LD50 is traditionally measured by feeding rats the chemical until 50% die. Edge cases include where 45% die at low doses but the other 55% take a lot higher dose to kill and cases where the majority get sick at a low dose but don't actually die until the dose is increased by a large amount.
Then there is LC50, chemicals that barely affect mammals but are quite toxic to fish. In this case LC means liquid concentration. Amphibians are also often much
Re:Still needs more research (Score:5, Insightful)
What is so difficult to grasp? These are systemic pesticides. They permeate the plant. You cannot wash them off. These exist in the flowers. In the corn. In the roots. In the stalk. The "industry" selling this poisons keep repeating that they do not get into the nectar, they do not get into the eatable bits. Well, this proves they lied - bees are the canary in the coal mine.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insecticide [wikipedia.org]
Systemic insecticides are incorporated by treated plants. Insects ingest the insecticide while feeding on the plants.
Just remember. Whatever is killing the bees, you are also eating. With old school pesticides I used to wash the produce with some soap (pesticides were stuck on plants with a type of a glue, so you need detergent to wash it off), but now with systemics, all I can do is move to organic only food.
PS. It is rather quite ironic in a sad way that these pesticides, aimed at increasing food production, are actually causing a decrease (no bees, and yields drop)
Re:Still needs more research (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, you can switch to organic food. Note, however, that these are neonicotinoids -- they act on insects in the same way as nicotine (which used to be widely used as an insecticide, and is still used by organic farmers), but are designed to lower acute toxicity in mammals. So, assuming you're a mammal, rather than a honeybee, you might actually be choosing the more dangerous option. (Of course, with any pesticide, the levels of application are kept such that the amount in the final product shouldn't be harmful to humans, so the risk to you eating the produce is vanishingly small either way -- nicotine toxicity is more an issue for the farm workers applying the concentrated product.)
The FDA and EPA do a reasonably good job of making sure pesticides for food crops are pretty safe for humans, both acutely and chronically, because that's what they do. They don't test everything so thoroughly for honeybees, which is why it was assumed that if levels were kept below acute toxicity levels, there'd be no problem. It doesn't follow that it's a problem for humans.
Re:Still needs more research (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, you can switch to organic food. Note, however, that these are neonicotinoids -- they act on insects in the same way as nicotine (which used to be widely used as an insecticide, and is still used by organic farmers), but are designed to lower acute toxicity in mammals. So, assuming you're a mammal, rather than a honeybee, you might actually be choosing the more dangerous option. (Of course, with any pesticide, the levels of application are kept such that the amount in the final product shouldn't be harmful to humans, so the risk to you eating the produce is vanishingly small either way -- nicotine toxicity is more an issue for the farm workers applying the concentrated product.)
The FDA and EPA do a reasonably good job of making sure pesticides for food crops are pretty safe for humans, both acutely and chronically, because that's what they do. They don't test everything so thoroughly for honeybees, which is why it was assumed that if levels were kept below acute toxicity levels, there'd be no problem. It doesn't follow that it's a problem for humans.
The problem is that the FDA doesn't really do much in the way of studies of long term, low level exposure. They would be awfully difficult to do. Since we don't have very good proxy measures for this sort of effect (unless Colony Collapse Disorder turns out to be such a proxy), it would take long periods of time and many people. Millions and millions of dollars. All we can say is very low level exposure to the neonicontinoids isn't acutely dangerous for humans. Everything else is up for grabs.
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All we can say is very low level exposure to the neonicontinoids isn't acutely dangerous for humans. Everything else is up for grabs.
You can say that about everything. That risk is the cost of progress.
To study effects over a long term, you need to do it over generations. And they need to be sufficiently isolated to prevent data contamination.
In this day and age, when progress doubles in 18 months, that kind of time frame not even on the same level of existence, much less inside the ballpark.
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Yes, you can switch to organic food. Note, however, that these are neonicotinoids -- they act on insects in the same way as nicotine (which used to be widely used as an insecticide, and is still used by organic farmers), but are designed to lower acute toxicity in mammals. So, assuming you're a mammal, rather than a honeybee, you might actually be choosing the more dangerous option. (Of course, with any pesticide, the levels of application are kept such that the amount in the final product shouldn't be harmful to humans, so the risk to you eating the produce is vanishingly small either way -- nicotine toxicity is more an issue for the farm workers applying the concentrated product.)
The FDA and EPA do a reasonably good job of making sure pesticides for food crops are pretty safe for humans, both acutely and chronically, because that's what they do. They don't test everything so thoroughly for honeybees, which is why it was assumed that if levels were kept below acute toxicity levels, there'd be no problem. It doesn't follow that it's a problem for humans.
Somebody mod this AC up, hes 100% spot on. Who modded the parent up anyway, its a wikipedia link from someone with an obvious paranoid bias. I mean he thinks corn is pollinated by bees for God`s sake (its wind pollinated).
If these studies are confirmed (and there are various critiques rolling in, so we'll see) they will tell us that the amount of neonicotinoid present in the kernel, a number so small as to be considered zero for the sake of human consumption, is just enough to essentially get bees drunk i
Re:Still needs more research (Score:5, Insightful)
Guessing youre the same AC who started this. Everything is toxic, in sufficient quantity. The link you give lists that particular pesticide as having no discernable carcinogenic effects and a very low toxicity relative to any reasonable exposure. Did you even read your own link? Pesticides in general do have some risk to humans.
The rule of thumb is that if it kills an insect keep an eye on it, because insects aren't that far from humans. Herbicides are by and large harmless unless you swim in the stuff. But the fear mongering you are doing isn't based on research. Its the same kind of conspiracy theory logic as the anti-vaccine crowd uses. This story is indicating an interesting side effect for a specific insect which ingests a toxin via an unforseen channel in a quantity not thought to be harmful. It could be a great example for a risk analysis course. It is not, however, a sky is falling moment for modern society, nor an "I told you so" moment for the GMO movement. If true, minor tweaks to the existing system fix the problem. Stop pretending its the end of the world.
Re:Still needs more research (Score:5, Insightful)
Just remember. Whatever is killing the bees, you are also eating.
And chocolate kills dogs, but I'll continue eating it. Caffeine really messes up spiders, but I'll continue drinking soda.
We don't react the same way as every other life form on earth to chemicals. Even if these pesticides are harmful to us, and they probably can be, there's dosage to consider. What is enough to kill a bee is most likely not enough to do a damn thing to someone of your size and weight. Even proportionally speaking (yes, I know you consume more than the bees).
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Assuming they used proper testing methods, this sounds like pretty conclusive proof.
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.
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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.
The story didn't say anything about GMO corn, it said that imidacloprid has gotten into HFCS because it's being sprayed on corn crops. Why bother commenting if you're only going to skim the article...the article recap at that? ADD much?
Re:Still needs more research (Score:4, Interesting)
The pesticide is transferred to the bees via corn. Corn without the pesticide is fine. Apparently bees are extremely sensitive to this particular pesticide. Apparently bees are extremely sensitive to this stuff. It only takes 20 parts per billion to kill the colony within six months.
To put that in perspective, arsenic is allowed in drinking water at a level of 10 ppb. Cyanide is allowed at 200 ppb.
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Tangential Jab (Score:4, Insightful)
The summary should be: "CCD Linked to Pesticide"
I get the feeling including HFCS so prominently in the story is more about triggering an emotional response in readers.
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For the benefit of those of us unaware of any controversy, what kind of emotional response could be triggered by mentioning high-fructose corn syrup?
Re:Tangential Jab (Score:5, Informative)
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That was an interesting read. Thank you.
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No. It gets a bad rap because of the sheer amount of it included in processed foods.
You can be sure that if the main ingredient in sugary drinks and processed foods were cane sugar, you'd hear how bad cane sugar is.
Notice how ordinary table salt and sodium was targeted also some time ago by health food proponents as a bad thing. It was because processed foods were laden with it, not because anybody thought table salt was poison.
It's a simplified argument, sure, but it is intended to drive the point home.
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Re:Tangential Jab (Score:5, Insightful)
No, if you RTFA, you can see that the link to HFCS is prominently featured because it explains the lag between imidacloprid introduction (1990s) to widespread observance of CCD (2006) because feeding hives with HFCS was not a widespread practice until then. Because the corn from which it is produced is often sprayed with imidacloprid, the HFCS contains trace amounts of imidacloprid well below safe limits for humans, and even below LD50 for the bees, but apparently sufficient to incur CCD over time. A related study described in the second linked article suggests that the class of pesticides to which imidacloprid belongs (neonicotinoids) interfere with the bees' homing ability, which explains the characteristic lack of dead adults in a colony that has suffered CCD--the adults apparently get lost while foraging and can't find their way back to the hive.
What I find most striking is that CCD did not seem to be much of a problem in the 90s when imidacloprid was introduced, which implies that bees are fine with it being sprayed on crops, but cannot tolerate even minute (measured in double digit parts per billion) traces when it is fed to them (in this case, via HFCS).
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No. Commercial media outlets should increase viewership by gaining a reputation for accurate, unbiased reporting.
Re:Tangential Jab (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not misrepresenting, though it is highlighting indirectly significant information.
The poison gets to the bees through High Fructose Corn Syrup (HFCS).
The poison gets into the HFCS from corn that's resistant to pesticide.
The corn that's resistant to pesticide is grown from seeds sold by Monsanto.
Ordinary corn wouldn't lead to this, because that much pesticide would have killed it.
Ordinary sugar wouldn't lead to this, because it's not from a crop that's drenched in the implicated pesticide.
So HFCS is a critical link.
But... (Score:3)
I thought it was fungus [sciencedaily.com].
Re:But... (Score:5, Insightful)
The study in this article shows evidence of causation:
It's easy to regurgitate that "correlation is not causation", but most people don't seem to quite understand what that sentence means.
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I thought it was fungus [sciencedaily.com].
I think this is the third cause discovered in the past month.
Monsanto-sponsored smear campaign (Score:2)
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The United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) considers glyphosate to be relatively low in toxicity, and without carcinogenic effects.[40] The EPA considered a "worst case" dietary risk model of an individual eating a lifetime of food entirely from glyphosate-sprayed fields, and with residue levels remaining at their maximum levels, and concluded no adverse effects would exist under these conditions
Whether it's cane sugar or corn sugar (Score:3)
Something Nobody Seems To Be Saying/Asking... (Score:3, Insightful)
Okay, so we've learned that HFCS that is derived from corn treated with a pesticide is responsible for causing CCD. And from the articles, it appears that bees that aren't fed HFCS (laced or not) don't seem to be collecting enough of the pesticide via their natural habits.
Great! Great news. Yay! Whoo-hoo, and all that jazz.
So why are we feeding the bees HFCS or sugar water?
A former beekeeper pointed out that they're fed HFCS and sugar water in late winter when the hives run out of honey. (In case you didn't know, bees don't make honey just for human benefit. It's supposed to be their food.)
So the next logical question would be, "Why are they running out of honey in late winter?"
Answer: Keepers are taking too much.
So! CCD isn't necessarily caused by a pesticide, it's caused by HUMAN GREED when idiot bee keepers harvest too much honey for a quick profit, and then try to keep their bees limping along on garbage. If they weren't stealing the winter food supply, and restrained themselves to taking only the summer surplus, then CCD would most likely never have happened. (Using sugar water USED to be a last-gasp, keeper-has-shit-the-bed-and-has-to-fix-it method of helping your bees survive your lack of proper planning? But now it's become canon.)
Once again, the cause of the problem is human greed and stupidity.
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:Something Nobody Seems To Be Saying/Asking... (Score:4, Insightful)
Ooooh, ouch. I'm sorry, losing a hive is terrible. A friend of my dad's used to cry for days if he lost a hive, but those were the "good old days".
Putting in a new colony is an exceptional event, and supplemental feeding is most certainly understandable. It takes time to get a colony firmly and safely established.
It is generally accepted that a healthy, well-established hive will require approximately 60lbs of honey to survive a typical "northern" winter. Some of the permaculture-minded documentation suggests that a keeper should go even further, and refrain from harvesting during the summer or fall, and wait until the spring when new flowers are coming out. That way, they can be absolutely certain that whatever honey is left over is truly "surplus".
But that's not what we're doing.
I would actually go so far as to suggest that "mobile hives", the ones that are freighted across the country from field to grove to field, shouldn't have *any* honey harvested from them at all. That way, they would have the very best food available to them when they arrive, as they work, and when they're in transport.
Heh. You might have guessed, but I don't see bees as "workers", but partners.
What a sick world... (Score:3)
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Oprah does it better [youtube.com]
Re:How soon before something is done about it thou (Score:5, Insightful)
Pretty soon once bee keepers start sourcing non-pesticide-laced feed for their bees.
If I were a milk producer and fed my cows a concoction that caused 90% of them to drop dead at the same time every two years I'd sure as hell look for a new feed source -- it could be fairly expensive even and the fact that I don't want to risk fundamental failure in my ability to survive would mean it's still a good deal for me.
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This [nih.gov] would appear to indicate that the substance in question does not occur in tobacco nectar, nor anywhere else in nature:
"The invention of imidacloprid, the most important neonicotinoid insecticide, was initiated by replacement of the framework of nithiazine with an imidazolidine ring."
Re:Do bees like tobacco plants? (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:3)
Nicotine sulfate has been used for a long time as an insecticide (Black Leaf 40 was a well known trade name.). Tobacco plant parts contain nicotine, but not the honey and pollen.
The neonicotinoids are a bit different. The arrangement of atoms in nicotine is used widely in living things for some of the chemicals that make them run. That's why putting something similar, like nicotine sulfate or the neonicotinoids into them messes them up. It takes the place of nicotinic chemicals and screws up the systems in
Re:What did they feed the bees before HFCS? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:What did they feed the bees before HFCS? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.