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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)
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.
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.
Imidacloprid is considered neonicotinoid, but its biochemical effects should not be compared to natural nicotine. Just as humans do, insects have a couple of different types of receptors for the neurotransmitter acetylcholine, including a nicotinic receptor. Insect physiology favors the nicotinic receptor pathway such that some insectides which are mildly toxic to humans are extremely poisonous to insects. Nicotine can activate these receptors temporarily, which is responsible for its physiological effects. However, imidacloprid irreversibly binds to the nicotinic receptor, which blocks acetylcholine transmission and leads to the insect's death. It appears that sublethal concentrations may still cause significant impairment, similar to myasthenia gravis.
"FDA staff reviewers expressed concern about the number of patients who were left out of the study because they died."
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).
As a former beekeeper, I can tell you they don't. They're only fed HFCS during the late winter, once they've run out of honey. A month later, they were making honey again. It didn't used to hurt them at all.
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.
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..."
Random Thoughts From A Diseased Mind (Not For Dummies)
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?
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 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.
Virgin birth, water into wine; it's like Harry Potter, but it causes genocide and bad folk music.