Three-Quarters of All Honey On Earth Has Pesticides In It (theverge.com) 103
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: About three quarters of all honey worldwide is contaminated with pesticides known to harm bees, according to a new study. Though the pesticide levels were below the limit deemed safe for human consumption, there was still enough insecticide in there to harm pollinators. The finding suggests that, as one of the study authors said, "there's almost no safe place for a bee to exist." Scientists analyzed 198 honey samples from all continents, except Antarctica, for five types of pesticides called neonicotinoids, which are known to harm bees. They found at least one of the five compounds in most samples, with the highest contamination in North America, Asia, and Europe. The results are published today in the journal Science.
To get a better sense of just how widespread neonic contamination is, Mitchell and his colleagues analyzed 198 worldwide honey samples collected as a citizen science project between 2012 and 2016. They found that 75 percent of honey contained at least one of the five tested neonics, and 45 percent of samples had two or more. Honey from North America, Asia, and Europe was most contaminated, while the lowest contamination was in South America. Neonic concentrations were relatively low: on average, 1.8 nanograms per gram in contaminated honey -- below the limits set as safe for people by the EU.
To get a better sense of just how widespread neonic contamination is, Mitchell and his colleagues analyzed 198 worldwide honey samples collected as a citizen science project between 2012 and 2016. They found that 75 percent of honey contained at least one of the five tested neonics, and 45 percent of samples had two or more. Honey from North America, Asia, and Europe was most contaminated, while the lowest contamination was in South America. Neonic concentrations were relatively low: on average, 1.8 nanograms per gram in contaminated honey -- below the limits set as safe for people by the EU.
Below the limit for humans, perhaps.... (Score:3)
Not so much below the limit that is safe for the bees, hmm?
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Given that the bees didn't die and they were able to carry out their primary mission (bring food back to the hive) I'd say their exposure was below acceptable limits.
Odd that they didn't look for other pesticide classifications like organophosphates, carbamates, pyretheroids, abamectins, etc. No, wait, it's not because they flat out kill bees with very minimal exposure. Neonics are one of the few things they can actually tolerate. Hell, cyantrani
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Given that the bees didn't die and they were able to carry out their primary mission (bring food back to the hive) I'd say their exposure was below acceptable limits.
Sure, it was probably within the limit for the healthy adult worker bees, but how about the much weaker and less developed bee larvae?
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You have a hive with many workettes, heh, heh and to say it was safe ignores the reality of dead bees. Sure enough survived to regurgitate plant syrup after the bees have partially digested it but that does not cover how productive the hive was compared to a hive that was not affected by pesticides. That data, actually productivity or hives related to surrounding plant life, season and levels of pesticide versus hives with no pesticides. Also what locations are bad for honey and pesticide contamination and
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Yes and 100% of humans will also be contaminated with pesticides and other chemicals as well. The idea that there is a toggle point that may be reached where not only bees but humans begin to drop dead seems to be unthinkable for many right wing types. Just like global warming they will stay in denial until total disaster forces them into a real view of the world.
You completely ignored the GP's larger point.
Bee's on a gross scale survive neonic exposure. Now, because studies show ill effects to bee's from neonic exposure, public pressure is mounting to ban Neonics. In fact, several governments of the world HAVE banned neonics for this exact reason.
GP pointed out the problem is that the alternative chemicals taking the place of neonics don't show the same ill effects on bees. They don't reduce the bee's range or weaken their immune systems. The problem is that the re
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They don't reduce the bee's range or weaken their immune systems. The problem is that the replacement chemicals don't do that because they outright kill the bees dead right then and there!
What exactly is the range of a dead bee? Isn't that a significant reduction in the range of a live one? And if the immune system is still working, how do they decompose when dead?
Have you ever been stung by a dead bee? (Bonus points to anyone who knows that reference, who asked it, and to whom.)
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The idea that there is a toggle point that may be reached where not only bees but humans begin to drop dead seems to be unthinkable for many right wing types.
Because the idea of a "toggle point" is not supported by any science of any kind. What actual science says is that there are levels of "contamination" that are not harmful at all. As the level of "contamination" increases, some effects may begin to develop. It's not like at 9 ppb As in water you have no effects but you start to die when you hit 10 ppb. The old standard used to be 50 ppb and we didn't see entire cities full of people dieing when they drank water with 30 ppb. The EPA changed the limit in 2001
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Re: Below the limit for humans, perhaps.... (Score:4, Insightful)
"Given that the bees didn't die ..."
How can you be sure they didn't die?
Maybe not on that trip but the next or the following day, they go out as usual and feel a bit sick. On the way back, laden with pollen and nectar, the starboard wings misfire then stop responding altogether and she spirals into the ground, only having time for a brief farewell dance to pass on her last message ("God bless the queen") before expiring.
All those funerals. So many funerals.
Re:Below the limit for humans, perhaps.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Neonics are one of the few things they can actually tolerate
You must have exceeded safe human exposure to Neonics if you think that.
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Or I might actually know something.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] ... considered only moderately toxic to bees.
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It has just made my day that you linked to Wikipedia but not to the article on Neoicotinoids which has a specific subsection dedicated to talking about it's various effects on bees.
You have an amazing political career in front of you.
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Given that the bees didn't die and they were able to carry out their primary mission (bring food back to the hive) I'd say their exposure was below acceptable limits.
This is exactly the way we kill ants. You don't want to kill the single ant, but to eradicate the hive. Sometimes a small dose delivered continously is more deadly than a high dose. It won't kill the workers, but it can accumulate in the queen (the only long living bee of the hive and quite essential for the surviving of the hive) and can also bring down the reproduction of new worker bees by slowing larva development or outright killing them.
If you want to bring down a nest or hive you don't kill the worke
This is not about the bees... (Score:1)
It's about moms and their precious little angels being fed !OMG! pesticides by the evil something or other.
That's why the titles for this "news" are all "HONEY IS FULL OF PESTICIDES! SOME OF IT WITH MORE THAN ONE!!! PANIC!!! HORROR!!!" instead of "Amount of nicotine-like compounds found in honey far below levels found in a single puff of tobacco smoke".
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Given that the bees didn't die and they were able to carry out their primary mission (bring food back to the hive) I'd say their exposure was below acceptable limits.
Your assertion is based on the assumption that the concentration of pesticides (or anything) never changes in the entire process of honey being made and collected. I can tell you that honey definitely changes from the time it is deposited by a bee to when it was tested. That the concentration of pesticides was exactly the same.
Secondly, they tested specifically for neocinids because it is known they can cause issues with bees. Do the other pesticides have any effect on bees? If not, then why chase a wild go
Re: Below the limit for humans, perhaps.... (Score:1)
What are you doing on Slashdot?
3/4 has just about anything in it (Score:2)
What is your proposal? (Score:1)
Do you have an alternative plan to protect bees from pests?
Re: What is your proposal? (Score:5, Insightful)
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I do admit I love honey. If that is greedy of me so be it. Still, we need to protect the bees so they make more.
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Reduce the number of people on it. Instead of sending wheat and corn to developing nations, we should return to sending them weapons. I mean, it did work, we had cheap food, they had to hand over their resources cheaply to buy for the weapons and our weapons industry had a fat export surplus. And there were fewer people.
What't not to like?
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I had recently read about the historical roots of the people
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Then I guess it was a good thing that we went over from time to time ourselves to carpet bomb the crap out of them to "cull the herd"?
Re:What is your proposal? (Score:4, Informative)
Do you have an alternative plan to protect bees from pests?
The purpose of the pesticides is not to "protect bees". It is to protect the crops from harmful insects. The bees are collateral damage.
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Dosage (Score:3)
Dosage matters, unless you are a nutcase like Alex Jones who thinks one atom of aluminum (the most abundant metal on the Earthâ(TM)s surface) will instantly guaranteed give you autism. Itâ(TM)s better to have pesticides and cheaper more plentiful food than famines and global catastrophic starvation and possible extinction via war.
What is the threshold dosage? (Score:5, Interesting)
Given the history of big corporations influencing dosage levels, we do not have to be a conspiracy nutcase (or somewhat fake nutcase) like Alex Jones to realistically assume powerful forces are going to be trying their best to corrupt the whole subject.
Then we have the history of science moving slowly due to funding etc, as well as being wrong for a while on top of the propaganda and corruption making it move slower. Remember when Pb was not a problem? Then we had various levels of acceptable Pb under different situations and finally after a REALLY LONG TIME the conclusion that there really is NO safe acceptable level Pb under most situations.
The stuff hasn't been around long enough to see long term problems and even so, if the problems can be kept close to the margins of error and if symptoms between people differ even slightly you divide the population so that the largest groups fall too close to error margins. I wouldn't put it past Monsanto to add something to make it WORSE to diversify symptoms... someday they WILL do something like this. because profits... duh.
Even old accepted standard tests such as the amount of Vitamin C we should have just have not been revised with better studies involving more than 1 man getting scurvy... plus there is the whole matter of what is a healthy amount vs what threshold is so bad symptoms develop. In this case, it could be the healthy amount is 3x as high as the minimum mean average.... why use a mean average?
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I'm gonna leave the rest of your rambling as sufficiently contradictory to discredit itself. You did make a very specific claim though to try and underline your whole train:
Remember when Pb was not a problem? Then we had various levels of acceptable Pb under different situations and finally after a REALLY LONG TIME the conclusion that there really is NO safe acceptable level Pb under most situations.
Here's the EPA's current position [epa.gov] on Pb in drinking water. Water treatment systems that maintain under 15 parts per billion of Pb are deemed good enough. They also have standards for safe levels of lead in pipes, because that's the largest source of it now. Your wearing your tinfoil hat too tight.
re-read (Score:2)
I was not specific - I said under most situations. I was NOT specifically referring to water. Actually, I was thinking paint and then gasoline both which took way too long to catch up with expert opinion (which should be enough when health and safety are involved... except profit $$$ so then it has to be 100% scientific consensus...)
As far as water, a quick google will show recently REVISED lower levels of Pb not that long ago...(CDC) which supports MY point - the thresholds keep changing and usually they
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I was not specific - I said under most situations. I was NOT specifically referring to water. Actually, I was thinking paint and then gasoline both which took way too long to catch up with expert opinion (which should be enough when health and safety are involved... except profit $$$ so then it has to be 100% scientific consensus...)
I can only gather from your previous post and this one that you believe that unleaded gasoline and lead-free paint all have 0 parts per billion of lead in them, correct?
I'm not sure how else to read your claim that there is NO safe acceptable level under most situations, and that you have no specifically listed gasoline and paint as examples. Of course you still provide no citations, so let me include another of my own. In addition to the lead standards on water, here is the canadian standards for lead in u
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Most people do not mean literally 100% exact extremes. 1 Atom literally makes an absolute statement false but practically speaking when we say NONE we normal people have THRESHOLDS and so does science and math when we round off and have acceptable margins of error. We don't have to specify such things except in an academic paper. It doesn't mean that the person has no clue; furthermore, even if they have no clue the statement can still be true. I wonder how somebody like you can function in society witho
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Most people do not mean literally 100% exact extremes. 1 Atom literally makes an absolute statement false but practically speaking when we say NONE we normal people have THRESHOLDS and so does science and math when we round off and have acceptable margins of error. We don't have to specify such things except in an academic paper. It doesn't mean that the person has no clue; furthermore, even if they have no clue the statement can still be true. I wonder how somebody like you can function in society without being able to selectively disabling anal mode, you literal minded time waster.
Well, if the EPA 15 ppb is acceptably close to zero for you, do the math on the 1.8 nanograms per gram the article cites as the average found in honey. Am I wrong, or isn't that 1.8 ppb? In the event I missed a zero, it's still about the same as the EPA allowances for human drinking water and lead.
Conspiracy is commonplace! (Score:2)
Stop turning off your brain whenever conspiracy comes up!
If you have any significant social experience and reasonable intelligence you've noticed conspiracies or participated in them!
A little bit of watching reality tv shows: groups of people plotting against each other for some advantage. That IS conspiracy; I've seen so little TV I suspect it must be a big feature of TV given my small sample size. No tinfoil hats are required. Hey, lets tell our parents we are doing X when we are actually doing Y! = c
Observe and act locally (Score:5, Interesting)
Hi, I'm not often posting but I have an anecdote. About three years ago I bought a house. First two years, no honeybees. This year we had them. Wowsa, great!! When I was young (40 yrs ago) honeybees were all around but haven't seen them for 20+ years.
Can I say what is different? Not sure. We are completely organic, but use horticultural oil for hemlock woolly adelgids & hemlock scale, not currently using but did/might future use spinosad for winter moth and gypsy moth. The exotic (asian, european) insects are very aggressive on native (north american) trees. Often defoliation is complete, no leaves left uneaten. It is hard to judge whether mild pesticides (horticultural oil, spinosad) to save the trees are better or worse than refraint for their (small, but non-zero) effect on honeybees.
Neonicotinoids seem to be a problem and restricting those has a high level of support. Let's start with removing those, and see where we go.
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You know what else I hardly ever see anymore? Grasshoppers. To a lesser extent, crickets. The lawn used to have plentiful grasshoppers. The easy way to find them was to slide your foot sideways through the grass. They'd scatter and you'd see all of them move. They were just about everywhere. Not anymore.
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I'm just happy I have worms in my soil.
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Hi Gilgaron,
Thank you for the response and I am interested to hear your experience. Unfortunately I have no experience near farmland. I live in old new england (beverly, ma); the farms turned to trees as agriculture went westward and the forests are developed into human holders. Unfortunately, I am not an expert of gardening; this year was my first attempt. For my wooded grove (which I love to death) I use only pesticides allowed under organic farming guidelines.
But I will give my limited knowledge. Th
Re: Observe and act locally (Score:1)
The theory is that plants are less likely to be eaten the more ideal their living conditions are and will thus need less pesticide, so avoid stressing plants, eg. when transplanting them, make sure the soil is right (pH, drainage, optimum nutrients etc), as well as the light and watering and position. If your plants have mildew, improve the ventilation; maybe grow them on a raised bed or in a more open site.
Yay! (Score:4, Funny)
I hear pesticides are rich in antioxidants.
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As long as they don't have fluoride I'm good.
Three-Quarters of All Honey On Earth Has Pesticide (Score:1)
Detection sensitivity (Score:4, Interesting)
We have the ability to detect materials in such minute amounts that we can find traces of almost anything, anywhere. It is definitely an effective way to generate headlines. But is it meaningful in any real sense? There is some botulinum toxin in the air you breathe. The question is always how much.
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Damned bees (Score:2)
Basically all biomatter on Earth contaminated (Score:2)
... with nuclear waste.
Since the spate of nuclear tests in the 60s, carbon-14 levels still haven't dropped to baseline [wikipedia.org].
There's also a market in pre-nuclear age steel [wikipedia.org] for use in applications where sensitive equipment would be affected by the cobalt-60 that contaminates our entire steel industry because it uses the air that we soiled with nuclear explosions.
However, we've not all mutated into comic-book superheroes or Cronenberg monsters.
Stuff gets contaminated with stuff. It's generally only a problem for bi
Skewed samples? Faulty conclusions! (Score:3)
honey samples collected as a citizen science project between 2012 and 2016. They found that 75 percent of honey contained at least one of the five tested neonics,
But unless those samples were from evenly distributed sources, across the world, all they tell us is that the places which returned the largest numbers of samples had the most pesticides.
That does not lead to the conclusion that three-quarters of all the honey (from everywhere) is the same as that sampled.
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Tradeoffs (Score:5, Insightful)
"About three quarters of all honey worldwide is contaminated with pesticides known to harm bees"
Of course, one might also point out that at least half, if not more, of earth's population has food and is alive ALSO because of pesticides, generally.
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If the bees die, we're fucked.
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It would be pretty bad, but not "fucked".
https://geneticliteracyproject... [geneticlit...roject.org]
1) 60% of US crops grow fine without bees. "...Wheat, corn and rice are wind-pollinated. Lettuce, beans and tomatoes are self-pollinated. The 12 crops that worldwide furnish nearly 90 percent of the worldâ(TM)s food â" rice, wheat, maize (corn), sorghums, millets, rye, and barley, and potatoes, sweet potatoes, cassavas or maniocs, bananas and coconuts â" are wind pollinated, self-pollinated or are propagated asexually
How about GMO bees that can take neonics? (Score:2)
Pesticide resistance happens naturally, how about we help bees become resistant to pesticides by GMO-ing them? (And do this multiple times in multiple ways with diverse bee genotypes, so that we aren't producing a bee monoculture.)
Or at least breeding them for that? Rapidly develop pesticide resistant honeybees? And while we are at it, why not help them become resistant to mites/viruses?
I *like* eating. We need bees, why not help them out?
--PeterM
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Pesticide resistance happens naturally, how about we help bees become resistant to pesticides by GMO-ing them? (And do this multiple times in multiple ways with diverse bee genotypes, so that we aren't producing a bee monoculture.)
Or at least breeding them for that? Rapidly develop pesticide resistant honeybees? And while we are at it, why not help them become resistant to mites/viruses?
I *like* eating. We need bees, why not help them out?
--PeterM
What about some unintended consequences that actually make things worse?
Are you afraid to take a breath? (Score:2)
Yes, what about unintended consequences.
Possibly, by simply taking a breath and letting it out, you MAY BE setting in chain a set of events that leads to a typhoon hitting Taiwan with massive loss of life. Weather is a chaotic system and this could truly happen.
So literally every breath you take could have dire unintended consequences. But you're powerless to foresee such so you don't worry about it, you can't possibly calculate the risks.
Similarly, I don't think giving bees resistance to neonics is going
Which Is It? (Score:3)
So, if pesticides are killing them, why are they making a comeback...
https://www.washingtonpost.com... [washingtonpost.com]
https://www.globalcitizen.org/... [globalcitizen.org]
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If you would read your own article, you'd see that wild honeybee populations are collapsing and beekeepers are struggling because they keep having to replace dying colonies....
Plus, that data is deceptive - a small rise in population (mostly due to beekeepers replacing colonies) can't be called a trend for a long while. There have been other blips in colony counts, in 1999 and 2004 - but the trend was still downward.
What are those same numbers for multi-year colonies? You know, the ones that beekeepers di
So does most Coffee (Score:2)
Why do the bad guys always win? (Score:2)
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If you are busy testing every potential pesticide against "the good bugs" to limit damage to them by banning the killer chemicals, then you are artificially removing the evolutionary pressure and they won't develop resistance.
Organic Honey (Score:3)
True "organic" (meaning without pesticides or other similar chemicals) honey is a very rare beast. There's basically nowhere on the continental US that can truly be declared organic. Bees can travel such distances (and so can herbicides and pesticides) that an entirely organic foraging area for honeybees is very hard to find. Even if, for example, you have multiple acres of prime foraging area, all if takes is a neighbor spraying glyphosphate, or neonic seeds to have spread, etc.
Since bees will not cross wide expanses of water, islands can be an isolated foraging area. Quite of a bit of honey designated organic comes from Hawaii, for instance.
Yes but what about the honey not on earth? (Score:1)