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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.'"
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?
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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.
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
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)
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.
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).
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.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.