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Colony Collapse Disorder Linked To Pesticide, High-Fructose Corn Syrup
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.'"
Not the bees!! Oh no my eyes! MY EYES!!!>/a>
- Big Corn
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.
Occasionally living proof of the Ballmer peak.
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.
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.
Even if there is proof pesticides are causing colony collapse, good luck in getting anything done about it until it's too late. It's happened too many times in the past that evidence is found that some chemical is bad for people or the environment (smoking, CFCs... there are many more examples) but lobbyists representing the makers of the pollutant manage to hold back any change in the law until the evidence against them is absolutely overwhelming.
I thought it was fungus.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
I read this article yesterday when it was in Firehose. While it may be reasonable that this pesticide is causing the problems, the article failed to specifically show a link to HFCS as the source of the problem. In particular, they apparently made no attempt to test the HFCS itself for pesticide levels. It is more likely that bees would get the pesticide directly via the environment than via highly processed corn product. Not to mention that maize corn is inside a husk, which should reduce the amount of pesticide in the kernels to begin with.
It's the scientific equivalent of saying "smoking causes cancer" + "cigarettes are sold in grocery stores" = "you can get cancer from going to a grocery store".
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
in 3, 2, 1
Imidacloprid and other neonicotinoid pesticides need to be banned immediately. Loss of bee colonies is one of the most important agricultural issues that is dramatically effecting yields. Its costing hundreds of billions of dollars in losses annually.
If bee colonies start to recover the problem will be solved and we can move on. The timing of the link is too much of a coincidence to be a chance event given the lab data. Too much money and food is at stake to wait. The ban must be immediate and total. Its not as if farmers couldn't profitably grow corn without it. There are other pesticides, but in general use of pesticides should be avoided to every extent possible as they are linked with so many other problems both ecological and human health related.
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.
Now we'll stop using this chemical, and the bees will recover. This is wonderful!
In some areas of the world, like in China, there are places where people pollinate
trees by hand, because all the bees are dead.
Meanwhile, I wonder if the CCD has killed all the Africanized bees. I thought they were supposed to be tough?
Bees seem to be plenty willing to take nectar from tobacco plants so I'm having a hard time believing this study. Yes, I'm an imidacloprid fan but you can keep you HFCS.
Without the subplot of bees being aliens that vacate the planet.
and the radical experimentation going on in our food supply. nope.
and the ozone hole has been stablilized.
The bees can tell the difference!
This reminds me of the plot of Batman (the one with Michael Keaton and Jack Nicholson)
Also, AUTISM
If pesticide-laden hfcs is having this impact on bee colonies, what is it doing to human beings given the prevalence of hfcs in modern 'diet'?
The article did not mention what was used to feed the bees before the beekeepers switched over to HFCS. Did they feed them honey?
I'm also a bit concerned about these pesticides showing up in my food. I'm not so naive as to think that all my food was free from pesticides before HFCS was put into everything, but I'm a bit concerned that the same pesticide is in just about every food I eat.
If the bees are feeding on pesticide laced food then how much of that pesticide is showing up in my honey?
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
But parasites can't be pinned on Humans so it's no worth mentioning.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
This, however, is something that beekeepers can directly address. All they need to do is stop feeding their bees syrup made from high fructose corn syrup.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Are they all stupid in this area of "Science"? Or terminally afraid? This is an incredible disgrace! Especially as they must know that without the bees it is curtains for the human race too.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
I seem to remember a few past slashdot articles on what is causing colony collapse. The causes ranged from cell phones to a DNA-based virus to fungus and now pesticide. What gives me pause about this current theory is that it is linked to the much maligned by the left high fructose corn syrup. How many people would believe a scientific study that linked cancer to abortions? Not many, you would want to know more about the politics of the people doing the study than their scientific credentials. Welcome to science of the 21st century!
Locally, here in Washington State, we had a situation where a farmer grazed his dairy cows on a field that had been sprayed with an herbicide. Those cows were then moved to another farm--an organic farm--to graze there as well. They dropped cow pies that contained the herbicide from the previous field. ANOTHER herd of dairy cows were grazed at a later point in time on the same "organic" field where they subsequently ingested the herbicide that transferred from the cow pies to the grass they were eating. THOSE cows then dropped cow pies elsewhere that were gathered for "organic" compost. This compost was then used to fertilize numerous organic farms throughout the area.
Some of those fields are no longer classed as "organic farms" due to the measurable levels of the same herbicide. In fact, the whole thing wasn't exposed as being an issue until local hobbyist farmers noticed that the compost was KILLING their crops. So, that means that despite being passed through the soil twice, and being digested twice by cows, the herbicide remained in the droppings of the second set of cows, in high enough concentrations, to continue killing plants.
This shit is persistent.
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.
[End Of Line]
Funny how that herbicide didn't kill plants the first two times it passed through the soil into the plants which were then digested by cows, it only started killing plants when it got to the hobbyist farmers. It's obvious the local hobbyist farmers were doing something wrong... since they were tofu-eating tree-hugging hobby-farmers they probably forgot something obvious like watering the crops when it wasn't raining. Damned hippies.
...in which bees are fed glucose instead of going foraging. They are not going out and pollinating the environment and bringing back bio-rich foodstuffs. They are being fed an effectively sterile product from a monoculture, that enhances a monoculture world - bio-feedback with a bad outcome.
Imidacloprid is better known as Bayer's Gaucho, at least in Europe.
I used to keep bees, but after the FDA approved this class of insecticides (~2004) none of my colonies made it over the winter. The law is that bee-lethal insecticides cannot be used where bees are present, but FDA made an exception for these "systemic insecticides" despite documented evidence of bee harm. I learned about this by 2006 and believe one of my neighbors was an early adopter of this bee poison. I am still waiting for FDA to reverse this approval.
CCD started getting press soon after, as beekeeping started to dwindle. The cause was controversial, because it wasn't a simple poisoning; the affected bees just disappeared from the hive. The history, and FDA test documents, we're really pretty clear. Bayer and other manufacturers have fought long and hard to keep selling their poison. This study is just one more in a long series. Sometimes they get coverage, usually not.
The /. comments are interesting, because HFCS has little to do with the story. Bees get the insecticide from nectar and pollen from dosed plants, including fruit trees, that circulate it throughout their system. The test added the insecticide to the HFCS that the bees were being fed, and the authors commented on the difficulty of measuring its concentration in the syrup and speculated on the amount in commercially available corn syrup. The GMO corn doesn't seem to actually have anything to do with the story. I am amused that an issue that is important to me is getting so much play for the worst of reasons.
The die off in bee populations started earlier than 2005. The specific problem of CCD may have started in that time frame, but there were articles on dropping bee populations going back much earlier.
Anecdotally, one of the things I noticed when I moved back to Illinois in 1999, was the near lack of wild honeybees, and how bumblebees had increased in number to fill that niche (where they could). At the time it was speculated to be due to the varoa mite.
There is also a nosema (common bee disease) variant, nosema ceranae that is much more virulent that has been showing up in various places worldwide.
It would be nice if this was all due to one easy problem of a single substance. But, this has been a tough puzzle to work out as it appears to be the combined effect of a number of stresses on bees.
crap. I am a confused person, apparently. The role of arsenic is different than I thought it was.
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
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 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).
This is in Washington State; it never stops raining.
not correlation. Your standard for causation is unreasonably high. Using your standard, we'd have to conclude that it's mere correlation that when we suspend a ball above the ground and then release it, gravity pulls it down. You would have us looking at the million plus tests of a ball falling to earth and decline to call that causation because we don't know how it works. (And we still don't know why matter has mass, which is what the whole hunt for the Higgs Boson is all about--see related articles).
I'm gonna go out on a limb and posit that researchers at the Harvard School of Public Health know about the scientific method and the difference between correlation and causation, and that they wouldn't make a wild claim, unsupported by solid empirical data, that would harm their careers.
Do you dispute their results? OK, great. Then you go out and repeat the study and try to recreate the results. That's what science is supposed to be about: testable conclusions.
Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.
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.
With the first link, the chain is forged.
Maybe they'll never find a smoking gun because the colonies collapse when one too many stresses are applied.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Would it be OK Mister if I ate those dead cows of yours?
I'd really love a citation for this. Herbicide passed through grass, through cows, through another generation of grass, through different cows, and still proved fatal to plants after it was composted? Not believable.
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.
The corn that's resistant to pesticide is grown from seeds sold by Monsanto.
All plants are resistant to pesticide.
Monsanto makes plants that are resistant to herbicide.
Don't it always seem to go....
That you don't know what you've got til it's gone
They paved paradise and put up a parking lot
Hey farmer, farmer, put away that DDT now
Give me spots on my apples, but leave me the birds and the bees.
Please!
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
What's this HFCS I keep hearing about? .. sounds like a funny chemical.
Think there might be a link to the uptick in autism?
FTA " It doesn't take much to eventually kill the bees accord to Lu, who said an incredibly small amount (20 parts per billion) of imidacloprid was enough to lead to Colony Collapse Disorder within 6 months. " 20 parts per billion?!? Maybe Homeopathy isn't a myth?
i wish someone would graph the increase in planted corn for ethenol,the increased use of patented insect resistent corn,
and this hive disorder on a timeline.
i think the results would be interesting.
if i knew how to do it i would because this has been my pet theory for five years.
mike
Monsanto's GMO corn was just recently completely banned in Poland [http://www.infowars.com/poland-announces-complete-ban-on-monsantos-genetically-modified-maize/] and has been banned in other places, too. France even found Monsanto guilty of chemical poisoning. [http://naturalsociety.com/breaking-monsanto-found-guilty-of-chemical-poisoning-in-france/] This GMO corn has been heavily processed and made into High Fructose Corn Syrup since the end of the 90s! It's been alleged that the self-produced pesticide in the corn, which is produced by every cell in the corn, has negative side effects on humans; the rise of the science of gut permeability (how readily foods or pollutants can escape through the walls of the gut, into the bloodstream) and a heavy rise in people with food allergies started a few years after the GMO corn entered the human food supply, and it's alleged by some that the GMO pesticide-corn eats away the lining of the gut and intestines. The mechanism by which the Bt toxin kills bugs is to break open the lining of their guts, and their bodies do the rest. We have much thicker guts, but do we really think that it can utterly devastate any bug, causes organ failure in rats [http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/01/12/monsantos-gmo-corn-linked_n_420365.html], but doesn't hurt people? Get real.
Repeat the same lies over and over again, thinking if you do it enough people will believe you.
A large core of powerful, monied (hence, Republican) interests reside in Miami, having been displaced from Bautistan Cuba, where they were even more powerful and monied. That's the real reason for the continued US policy towards Cuba.
Now the race is on to engineer and patent some neonicotinoid-resistant bees!
If interested, you can read what experts like sweetener expert, John White, Ph.D., and Bee Expert and Biologist Randy Oliver have to say about this study http://blog.sweetsurprise.com/2012/04/20/ccd-insecticides-bees-hfcs/
Therese, Corn Refiners