Harvard Study Links Neonicotinoid Pesticide To Colony Collapse Disorder

walterbyrd (182728) writes in with news about a new study from Harvard School of Public Health that links two widely used neonicotinoids to Colony Collapse Disorder. "Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD), or the widespread population loss of honeybees, may have been caused by the use of neonicotinoids, according to a new study out of Harvard University. Neonicotinoids are a class of pesticides, chemically similar to nicotine. They were first developed for agricultural use in the 1980's by petroleum giant Shell. The pesticides were refined by Bayer the following decade. Two of these chemicals are now believed to be the cause of CCD, according to the new study from the School of Public Health at the university. This study replicated their own research performed in 2012."

Comments

Who would have guessed?

[Anonymous Coward]

Insect poison found to be harmful to insects. Imagine that!

Re:Who would have guessed?

[plover]

The neonicotinoids have been seen as a great advancement in insecticides because they are toxic to insects, but much less so to mammals. Compare them with chemicals like DDT, which are effective against insects, but kill the higher orders in the food chain that eat them.

The problem with them is that they are extremely effective at disrupting bees - about 1/150 of the dose needed to kill other insects is enough to confuse bees. And the products are advertised as rose and garden insecticides, which are naturally attractive to bees. It only takes a few bees worth of nectar gathering to bring down a colony.

Re:Who would have guessed?

[Anubis IV]

Indeed. Unfortunately, from what I've been able to gather, they merely identified that neonicotinoids are harmful to bees and cause CCD symptoms, without drawing any sort of correlation between the rise of the CCD pandemic and the rise of neonicotinoids in the market, let alone demonstrating that as neonicotinoids spread to various regions, CCD spread with it.

It's one thing to say "hemlock is poisonous to humans". It's quite another to say "Socrates died from drinking hemlock". Kudos to them for identifying something that's harmful to bees and seems to cause CCD, but finding a cause for CCD is quite different from finding the cause for the CCD pandemic. I hope they can provide evidence of the latter.

Re:Who would have guessed?

[Anonymous Coward]

....and it takes a Harvard Study of the obvious before it occurs to the general public that it may be true. Thank goodness for Harvard's timely assertion of the obvious, after the fact. Where would we be without them...

Re:Who would have guessed?

[plover]

While actual evidence would be good, it will likely never be "proven" in the same way that for fifty years, smoking was never "proven" to cause lung cancer.

Imidaclopirid is a really useful insecticide, and I am not at all thrilled that it might be completely banned. It works perfectly in greenhouses and indoors. Perhaps instead of banning it, they could increase the number of beehives by a factor of ten? Or maybe they could breed imidaclopirid-resistant bees?

Or maybe I just have to buy a 50-year supply of the stuff.

Re:Who would have guessed?

[MightyMartian]

Heaven forbid we ever wean ourselves of a harmful product.

Re:Who would have guessed?

[Anonymous Coward]

> increase the number of beehives by a factor of ten

Who will pay for this ? The consumer of course. The question - if you throw away ecological concerns - then is: is that worth it economically, or is dropping these neonicotinoids better?

Re:Who would have guessed?

[Urquhardt]

And how many times do the Religious Right and others have to be hit over the head before they believe the science? Joe Public is probably not even aware of how fragile ecosystems are and the damage being done.

Re: Who would have guessed?

[burne]

Enough neonicotionoid progress and you might have nothing left to eat. Or take turns pollinating the plants that will become your food with a brush.

Re:Who would have guessed?

[sjames]

Well, yeah, he swore he would kill her, he was holding the gun that shot her to death and was standing over her dead body, and OK, the gun was still warm from firing and sure, there was nobody else around within a 20 mile radius, but I swear, he's totally innocent!

They showed the stuff causes CCD, nobody disputes that it is used on crops. We already know that CCD is a bad thing, so we have enough reason to stop using it. They're saying hemlock is poisonous to humans, here is Socrates dead and this half empty cup contains hemlock. The correct conclusion is not that he died of old age.

Re:Who would have guessed?

[bennyp]

Insect poison found to be harmful to insects. Imagine that!

Poppycock!

Re:Who would have guessed?

[jandersen]

Imidaclopirid is a really useful insecticide, and I am not at all thrilled that it might be completely banned. It works perfectly in greenhouses and indoors. Perhaps instead of banning it, they could increase the number of beehives by a factor of ten? Or maybe they could breed imidaclopirid-resistant bees?

Banning the substance might be an incentive for them to develop something better, which has been better tested? Historically, that is the way things have always progressed - some new substance is hailed the new panacea, it is then discovered to be too dangerous in certain respects; then follows the usual struggle with those whose greed far outweighs their concern for the harm they cause. Just look at the history of things like opium, then heroin, cocaine, strychnine, arsenic etc.

Personally, I think there are many more factors involved in CCD, and all have to do with people who cut corners to increase profit. There is little doubt that these poisons play an important role, and it would be a good idea to ban them. But we also need to address the other factors:

- Farmers that spray over open flowers and far too often, thereby loading the environment with poisons.
- Beekeepers who lug hundreds or thousands of colonies around the country on lorries, spreading diseases and parasites, as well as stressing the bees.
- Monocultures of both bees and crops.

These are all difficult problems to solve, but they are not impossible. Farmers can be educated - the modern farmer is already highly educated, so of course they can learn better practices. There are many ways to encourage local beekeeping in favour of these huge, industrial scale setups; an outright ban might be worth considering. Yes, those huge beekeepers might go out of business, but is that any worse than, say, closing a factory in Detroit? And it will open the market for the small, local beekeepers.

As for monocultures - there is probably a good middle ground between the gigantic monocultures we see, especially in the US, and the complete mixing of crops in the same field. In many countries you will find that farms have a variety of crops - relatively small fields of monocultures, but differents crops in each field, a model which still allows for mechanical harvesting and high yields, and which is better for the environment in general.

As for bees - there are 20000 known species of bees, all of which play a role in pollination, but we only keep one species. And in fact, we only keep a small subset of that one species - the subset that has been optimised for honey yield, ease of management etc.

What really gets me up in arms is this attitude of giving up without even trying - "It sounds like it migh be inconvenient, so I don't want that". We have progressed this far by solving problems and changing our habits, by being willing to face reality and overcome challenges.

Re:Who would have guessed?

[jabuzz]

Really because I watched a documentary about this on the BBC a while back. In the USA in CCD all the bees just disappear from the hives. In the U.K. they all end up dead literally just outside the hive. So clearly CCD is different between the USA and the UK, yet neonicotinoids are being blamed both sides of the Atlantic.

I would also note that there is no CCD in Australia last I heard, and although I have no direct evidence it seems unlikely that they are not using neonicotinoid based insecticides.

It is highly unlikely that CCD is down to one single cause, and while neonicotinoid based insecticides might play a part it is far from proven.

Re:Who would have guessed?

[Freultwah]

Organic farming uses natural pesticides, such as specific plants and plant infusions that insects are averse to, and those are not used to spray the crops, they are strategically planted or placed in the field. And they are completely harmless to humans. Where did you get that ‘older pesticides’ nonsense?

Re:Who would have guessed?

[Poingggg]

Yes, because organic farming is strictly limited to older pesticides, many of which are even more deadly, especially to humans.

I prefer progress in my food.

The point of organic farming is NOT to use any pesticides. What you say here is total nonsense. (I could have mentioned manure produced by male bovines too).

Re:Who would have guessed?

[sjames]

That was well explained in TFA. The insecticide leaves them much more vulnerable to parasites (if any) that might attack them.

Re:Who would have guessed?

[delt0r]

You should go visit an organic farm. It is clearly not what you think it is.

Re:Who would have guessed?

[delt0r]

Where does this come from. Organic farming has never been about that. Organic farms use pesticide and fungicides, how else do you think that crops doing get naturally eaten before harvest otherwise?

Re:Who would have guessed?

[Poingggg]

Where does this come from. Organic farming has never been about that. Organic farms use pesticide and fungicides, how else do you think that crops doing get naturally eaten before harvest otherwise?

A poster before me in this thread has already answered that one. See http://news.slashdot.org/comme...

Re:Who would have guessed?

[conureman]

Organic farms use pesticide and fungicides

No, they don't.

Re:Who would have guessed?

[squizzar]

There's an awful lot of stuff you could make from plants that isn't exactly 'friendly' if used in high enough quantity or concentration. Reduction ad absurdum: Crude oil is simply the remains of zooplankton and algae after heat and pressure has been applied for some time... would you spray a field with it? Just because it's from a 'natural' source doesn't mean it's harmless.

Re:Who would have guessed?

[conureman]

increase the number of beehives by a factor of ten

What new arable lands have you discovered?

Re: Who would have guessed?

[Entrope]

Science (or at least Scientific American) disagrees with you: http://blogs.scientificamerica...

Re:Who would have guessed?

[Charliemopps]

The neonicotinoids have been seen as a great advancement in insecticides because they are toxic to insects, but much less so to mammals. Compare them with chemicals like DDT, which are effective against insects, but kill the higher orders in the food chain that eat them.

The problem with them is that they are extremely effective at disrupting bees - about 1/150 of the dose needed to kill other insects is enough to confuse bees. And the products are advertised as rose and garden insecticides, which are naturally attractive to bees. It only takes a few bees worth of nectar gathering to bring down a colony.

Which makes it interesting. CCD has been shown to be far less prevalent in Urban areas where these very plants are often found.

Re: Who would have guessed?

[Pinky's Brain]

"copper and sulfur" if that's the worst examples he can come up with of pesticides used in organic farming I'll take it.

Re:Who would have guessed?

[Anonymous Coward]

You left out the factor that most beekeepers take all the honey from the hive, and give them sugar water or corn syrup to replace it.

Re: Who would have guessed?

[Entrope]

Those are the most commonly used organic-approved pesticides, not necessarily the most toxic. Either way, the people claiming that organic means "no pesticides" are either ignorant or lying.

Re:Who would have guessed?

[delt0r]

And that is wrong. You buy "organic" pesticides in 44 gallon drums. It is just certified as organic, which really means jack. And its often more poisonous to humans that modern pesticides not to mention less environmentally friendly. From both a CO2 footprint, and residue effects. But hay if you want to feel better about being poisoned by something organic......

Re:Who would have guessed?

[delt0r]

Go to one. Watch. I worked on them. We used pesticides and fungicides. No mount of feeling better about yourself for buying them will change that fact.

Re:Who would have guessed?

[ndavis]

You should go visit an organic farm. It is clearly not what you think it is.

This is true although it depends on the organic farm. I can't remember the name of the documentary I watched but basically the "Organic" label has been taken over by big Agriculture with them changing the definition to fit what they need.

Saying this you can still find true Organic farms where they don't use pesticides and care about the soil's longterm health they are just harder to find.

Re:Who would have guessed?

[smoore]

they could increase the number of beehives by a factor of ten?

Clearly you are not a beekeeper. I am. There are many limiting factors in increasing the number of hives maintained. The shear amount of work and time it takes you to maintain the hives becomes unmanageable. Hiring employees isn't as easy as it is with other profession, for some reason lots of people won't take a job where they wear a sealed up thick hot suit in the blazing sun all day because its the better choice than getting stung by the insects you are working with.

You also need the physical space for the hives in a place where there is enough forage for the bees to feed on. Increasing by a factor of 10 isn't just adding 10 new hives to one location for every one already there, its finding new sites in rural areas a significant distance from the sites you already have (bees typically fly up to 3 miles). Having new sites vastly increases the amount of time it takes to maintain the hives since a lot of travel time is added in addition to the extra management. While backyard beekeepers can keep a few hives and no one notices, 10+ in a single location means you need to start looking for places with acreage isolated from the public.

On top of that the equipment has to purchased, built, painted and carted to the new areas (you can hire for this part thankfully). The existing hives have to be split in a responsible manner that leaves the parent hive strong enough to survive, getting 3-4 new hives out of 1 every year is more than is usually practical 10 is ridiculous. Doing one split in spring (going from 1 hive to 2) is common, maybe a second split in late spring or fall if the hive is strong.

Then you have to add in the winter losses. Losing 25%-30% of your hives over winter is not uncommon or too far out of the norm. The more you split the weaker the hives will be and the fewer that might make it through the winter.

Once you have planned out all that you need the money to do it. Having a few hives for a hobby is nice, having dozens if not hundreds is a business. In order to support the capital investment in equipment, workers and bees you need pollination contracts (thats what makes beekeepers money, honey is a sideline). Which means you need farmers planting crops that they need bees to pollinate. Of the top crops in America (Corn, Soybeans, Hay, Wheat, Cotton ,Sorghum, Rice) only soybeans and cotton produce the nectar to feed bees. Putting bees in typical American wheat field is putting them in a food desert, they will starve. And while bees will pollinate soybeans and cotton the farmers don't need them pollinated so aren't going to pay you to put bees there. Our monoculture farming practices, and the crops we produce limits the locations you can keep bees and have some one pay you to do so. When the monoculture crop is done flowering you have to move the bees because the monoculture farming practices means as soon as a bee friendly crop is done blooming the area is a food desert again.

Re:Who would have guessed?

[k2r]

> "organic" pesticides [are] just certified as organic, which really means jack.
> ...[]
> And its often more poisonous to humans that modern pesticides not to mention less environmentally friendly.

Source or your're a shill.

Re:Who would have guessed?

[Rob the Bold]

While actual evidence would be good, it will likely never be "proven" in the same way that for fifty years, smoking was never "proven" to cause lung cancer.

Imidaclopirid is a really useful insecticide, and I am not at all thrilled that it might be completely banned. It works perfectly in greenhouses and indoors. Perhaps instead of banning it, they could increase the number of beehives by a factor of ten? Or maybe they could breed imidaclopirid-resistant bees?

Or maybe I just have to buy a 50-year supply of the stuff.

Might want to buy a 50 year supply of honey, macadamia nuts, apples, squash, melons, canola oil (I sure didn't know that one!), etc., too. I can personally pollinate -- but it seems really creepy -- a one-person supply of spaghetti squash, but what about all the folks in apartments and whose HOAs forbid growing food?

Re:Who would have guessed?

[denzacar]

http://www.colostate.edu/Dept/...

Some Pesticides Permitted in Organic Gardening

By Laura Pickett Pottorff, Colorado State University Cooperative Extension horticulturist and plant pathologist

If we think organic gardening means vegetables free of any chemical pesticides, we don't have the story quite right.

Organic gardeners can use certain pesticides -- chemicals that are derived from botanical and mineral-bearing sources. These chemicals may be highly toxic, but they break down more rapidly than common chemicals, such as the Sevins, Malathions and 2,4,Ds.

The use of botanical and mineral-bearing pesticides, even though some are toxic, also can be incorporated into an Integrated Pest Management (IPM) approach to growing crops. IPM relies on a variety of pest control means rather than on one product or method. The pesticides discussed below are appropriate to include in IPM programs.

Just as the more common chemicals are given toxicity ratings -- CAUTION, WARNING or DANGER -- so are chemicals from botanical and mineral-bearing sources. "CAUTION" means low toxicity or completely free from danger; "WARNING" means moderately toxic and "DANGER" means highly toxic. The toxicity rating for each pesticide is provided in the paragraphs below.

BOTANICAL PESTICIDES

Nicotine Sulfate

Nicotine is extracted from tobacco or related Nicotiana species and is one of the oldest botanical insecticides in use today. It's also one of the most toxic to warm-blooded animals and it's readily absorbed through the skin. (Wear gloves when applying it, follow label directions and keep pets away from application areas.) It breaks down quickly, however, so it is legally acceptable to use on organically grown crops.

Nicotine sulfate is sold as a 40 percent nicotine sulfate concentrate under trade names that include Black Leaf 40 or Tender Leaf Plant Insect spray. Nicotine kills insects by interfering with the transmitter substance between nerves and muscles. It's commonly used to control aphids, thrips, spider mites and other sucking insecticides on most vegetables, some fruits, flowering plants and ornamental shrubs and trees. Roses are sensitive to nicotine. Choose alternate pest control measures when treating insects on roses.

Nicotine sulfate has a DANGER warning.

Sabadilla

Sabadilla, another botanical insecticide, is derived from the seeds of the sabadilla lily. The active ingredient is an alkaloid known as veratrine.

Sabadilla is considered among the least toxic of botanical insecticides, but its dust can be highly irritating to the eyes and can produce sneezing if inhaled. No residue is left after application of sabadilla because it breaks down rapidly in the sunlight.

Sold under the trade names Red Devil or Natural Guard, Sabadilla is effective against caterpillars, leaf hoppers, thrips, stink bugs and squash bugs. The insecticide is labeled for use on many vegetables. It has been assigned a CAUTION rating.

Rotenone

Rotenone is a resinous compound produced by the roots of two members of the Leguminoceae family. Its common use is to control various leaf-feeding caterpillars, beetles, aphids and thrips on a wide variety of vegetables and small fruits. A slow-acting chemical, rotenone requires several days to kill most susceptible insects, but insect feeding stops shortly after exposure.

Rotenone is moderately toxic to most mammals, but is extremely toxic to fish. It's widely used to poison "trash" fish during restocking projects. It has been assigned a CAUTION rating.

Neem

Neem is a botanical pesticide derived from the neem tree, a native of India. This tree supplies at least two compounds, azadirachtin and salannin, that have insecticidal activity and other unknown compounds with fungicidal activity. The use of this compound is new in the United States, but neem has been used for more than 4,000 years for medicinal and pest

Re:Who would have guessed?

[Nemesisghost]

Source or your're a shill.

I'll take you up on that. How's a simple Google search as a citation? The ads are all for "organic pesticides". Followed by several articles & websites either offering advice in what can be used(one of which is to use tobacco water, which generally has the same effect as how this pesticide is used) or explaining how these methods are just as bad or worse than regular pesticides.

The thing I learned by going over several of the articles turned up by this search is that the difference between an "organic" farm & a non-organic one isn't that there are no pesticides or that they aren't a factory farm, but that they only use naturally occurring and often unregulated pesticides, frequently at much higher application levels. Even worse, is that some of the pesticides & pesticide methods have much the same effect as synthetic ones, mainly because the base compounds are related(like using tobacco water versus neonicotinoids, as both are based on nicotine-like chemicals). What I see is no different than homeopathic remedies vs traditional medicine.

Re: Who would have guessed?

[AthanasiusKircher]

Enough neonicotionoid progress and you might have nothing left to eat. Or take turns pollinating the plants that will become your food with a brush.

Some plants -- particularly some that humans have bred for food, selecting bigger tastier food over reproduction potential -- already have impaired pollination features. Thus, pollination is already accomplished manually for some crops.

There are some ways to handle this on an industrial scale, but gardeners often do it by hand with certain plants. All it takes is a little stroll in the garden and some wrist action. Seriously. Years ago my neighbor always did this with his sweet corn plants and referred to it as "having sex with his corn."

Re:Who would have guessed?

[morgauxo]

Neonicotinoids are just a chemical that a plant naturally produces for protection againsts insects made more potent by concentrating it into a more pure form.

Re:Who would have guessed?

[pr0fessor]

I live in the Midwest there are many farms and organic farms contrary to what you may read they do use pesticide and fertilizer they just don't use things like anhydrous ammonia. The anhydrous ammonia is flammable, it stinks, burns my nose, and makes my eyes water from miles away, I couldn't imagine actually handling it, but people eat corn that it's been used on.

Re:Who would have guessed?

[mcvos]

If a farm uses harmful pesticides, it should not be called organic. If calling it that is legal in the US, then the word has become meaningless.

Re:Who would have guessed?

[mcvos]

Really because I watched a documentary about this on the BBC a while back. In the USA in CCD all the bees just disappear from the hives. In the U.K. they all end up dead literally just outside the hive. So clearly CCD is different between the USA and the UK, yet neonicotinoids are being blamed both sides of the Atlantic.

Is it possible that the US and UK have slightly different species of bees? Are bees used in a different manner? In a different environment?

That the problem manifests is a different manner doesn't mean there's no problem. It probably means you haven't isolated all of the variables. CCD could easily manifest differently in different species.

Re:Who would have guessed?

[Captain Splendid]

Hi. Organic farmer here.

The term organic is meaningless, and is as much a marketing tool as anything else. Buying organic food without checking out ingredients/growing methods is as stupid as not checking the provenance of anything else.

Having said that, there are many methods of protecting your crops that do not involve complex pesticides and other "highly unfriendly to certain types of living organisms" products. Really, it all boils down to whether you're lazy, or really want to produce and eat food that isn't going to do you or your environment any extra harm.

So do a little research before you buy. There's plenty of us growing this way and we're happy to detail exactly what we do and don't do to our food. Just ask.

Re:Who would have guessed?

[Xest]

"It works perfectly in greenhouses and indoors."

Does it? Tell that to the mealy bugs I can't get rid of with it.

Honestly, it seems useless anyway, at least the systemic element of it, everything I've tried it on seems immune to it already. It's okay as a contact insecticide but that's not even the imidacloprid itself but more the butane from the aerosol, and besides, a squirty bottle of water and fairy liquid solution does just as good a job as a contact insecticide.

Can't say I'd miss it at all. It's no more effective than Thiacloprid and Acetamiprid, though that's all mostly crap too.

Re:Who would have guessed?

[Anonymous Coward]

"CCD" is used a lot like "natural causes". It's what they call it when your bee colony collapses for unknown (or unspecific) reasons.

It's likely that a lot of different things are the cause of different collapses, but that doesn't mean one potential cause should be ignored just because it's unlikely to be the sole issue (that would be like saying we shouldn't bother with skin cancer research because it won't help cure people with liver cancer.)

Re:Who would have guessed?

[Shimbo]

And they are completely harmless to humans.

Sorry, but that's grade A nonsense. There isn't any chemical that is completely harmless to humans.

Re:Who would have guessed?

[The123king]

Will people stop putting "harmful" in front of the word "pesticide", please? It's just stating the obvious.

Re:Who would have guessed?

[gewalker]

Maybe Helium, Neon, Argon, Krypton, and Xenon

OK, suck in to much of these and you can deprive yourself of oxygen.
Cool them to liquid temperature and drink them, not a good idea either.

But chemically speaking, I think these are pretty harmless.

Re:Who would have guessed?

[geekoid]

I see you have bought into the lies hook line and sinker.
http://theness.com/neurologica...

Organic farming produces less yields, is more harmful to the environment used more pesticides and herbicides, but it gets a free pass becasue of the word 'Natural'. The fruit is no more or less nutritional then science based farming,

Re:Who would have guessed?

[geekoid]

http://theness.com/neurologica...

Re:Who would have guessed?

[geekoid]

http://theness.com/neurologica...

Re:Who would have guessed?

[sjbe]

If a farm uses harmful pesticides, it should not be called organic.

The meaning of the term organic is tightly defined and is a matter of public record. What you believe it should mean is, for better or worse, irrelevant.

If calling it that is legal in the US, then the word has become meaningless.

Quite the opposite. It means VERY specific things and those specific things have nothing to do with ill-defined notions of healthiness. If you cannot be bothered to find out that there is a lot of greenwashing going on then that is on you. There are way too many people arguing that organic = great and GM food = evil without using any actual facts in the discussion. In principle organic foods may carry certain advantages and there is some evidence to support that but the key word there is some. Just because something say's "organic" or "natural" or "healthy" on the label doesn't mean a damn thing by itself. The issues at hand just aren't that simple.

Re:Who would have guessed?

[pastafazou]

Organic farming is incapable of providing enough yield to meet worldwide demand. So while you are correct, you have not solved the problem that led to the need for pesticides, herbicides, and genetic modifications.

Re:Who would have guessed?

[k2r]

Thanks, interesting!

The article even links to this blog on scientific american:
http://blogs.scientificamerica...

Re: Who would have guessed?

[interkin3tic]

For anyone wondering, that's not much of a hyperbole:

...one-third of the human diet comes from insect-pollinated plants, and the honeybee is responsible for 80 percent of that pollination, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Even cattle, which feed on alfalfa, depend on bees. So if the collapse worsens, we could end up being "stuck with grains and water," said Kevin Hackett, the national program leader for USDA's bee and pollination program. "This is the biggest general threat to our food supply," Hackett said.

source

Re:Who would have guessed?

[k2r]

> What I see is no different than homeopathic remedies vs traditional medicine.

I have to rethink my impression of organic food not (though this might be different in Europe and with the organic labels we have).
But I'm confident that homeopathic pesticides are safest. (i.e. washing the food) :-)

Re:Who would have guessed?

[k2r]

s/not/now/

Re: Who would have guessed?

[orangesquid]

Oh, my favorite pesticide to use is ricin, a natural component of the castor bean plant! ;)

Re:Who would have guessed?

[plover]

Thanks, this is the stuff I don't know.

Keep in mind that many of the objections you raise can be answered with money. People don't like hot suits? How about for $25/hr? Need more colonies, due to winter conditions? More business for the beekeepers; perhaps migrating them to warmer climes, or keeping them a bit more sheltered over winter. And maybe money can't fix everything: the density of colonies per acre might simply be too low. Doesn't mean we shouldn't consider options.

Re: Who would have guessed?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yea, but corn, by it's very nature is not pollinated by bees, so the wrist action you speak of, is pretty fucking simple to pollinate corn that way.

Try a small tomato grove with a mere 5000 blooms. Your wrist action means jack squat.

You get back to me when you're done with the qtips and those 5000 blooms.

Re: Who would have guessed?

[Anonymous Coward]

Look down and see another organic pesticide that causes Parkinsons-disease-like symptoms.

Re: Who would have guessed?

[tibit]

A modern industrial robot on a moving base with a modern industrial vision system should handle that very efficiently. Possibly more efficiently than the bees themselves.

Re:Who would have guessed?

[tibit]

lots of people won't take a job where they wear a sealed up thick hot suit in the blazing sun all day

This problem has been solved, lemme think, about the time we were doing our first EVAs in LEO. Just because the beekeeping industry is more than half a century behind the times doesn't mean the problem hasn't been solved many times over.

Re:Who would have guessed?

[tibit]

In the USA in CCD all the bees just disappear from the hives.

That sounds to me more like a skunk feeding on them at night than CCD :) Yes, seriously, damn skunks can wipe out an entire hive in a couple of nights. The bees are too silly to resist the skunk's scratching on the bottom of the hive, it seems. They just walk out on the surface of the hive, since they don't fly at night, and the skunk just eats them. I've seen it happen, and it's both sad and silly-looking.

Re: Who would have guessed?

[Pinky's Brain]

It notes that the NOP allows it's use (which admittedly is relevant for imported food). The EPA won't certify it for any agricultural use though and it has been phased out in the EU as well. So at least the hippies who buy at the farmers market won't eat vegetables sprayed with Rotenon (unless the farmer broke the law).

PS. I don't buy organic food, but I'm starting to get allergic reactions to fruits and vegetables which I never had trouble with in the past (and not all the time now). Usually imported too when I check afterwards, I might have to become a hippy as well :/

Re:Who would have guessed?

[ultranova]

Having said that, there are many methods of protecting your crops that do not involve complex pesticides and other "highly unfriendly to certain types of living organisms" products.

Given that we have lots of unused arable land and lots of unemployed people, is there really any reason to worry about this at all? Just ban pesticides, accept that half of your crops is going to be eaten by bugs and plant twice as much. It could even arrest the economic collapse resulting from said unemployment we're heading to.

Re:Who would have guessed?

[Anonymous Coward]

Banning the substance might be an incentive for them to develop something better, which has been better tested? Historically, that is the way things have always progressed

Not with DDT. Banning that has cost an enormous number of lives.

Re:Who would have guessed?

[Captain Splendid]

is there really any reason to worry about this at all?

Less a worry and more a position on the risk/reward curve.

Re: Who would have guessed?

[Anonymous Coward]

"copper and sulfur" if that's the worst examples he can come up with of pesticides used in organic farming I'll take it.

So you're suggesting that Cu is not a serious soil pollutant that has implications for plant an human health if used frequently as a fungicide/bactericide in farming?

Interesting.

Re: Who would have guessed?

[GWBasic]

Not true at all! Organic food is routinely sprayed with plant-derived compounds. The FDA only requires that a spray gun sit idle for 3 years before it is fit for organic spraying.

Re:Who would have guessed?

[gzuckier]

The neonicotinoids have been seen as a great advancement in insecticides because they are toxic to insects, but much less so to mammals. Compare them with chemicals like DDT, which are effective against insects, but kill the higher orders in the food chain that eat them.

The problem with them is that they are extremely effective at disrupting bees - about 1/150 of the dose needed to kill other insects is enough to confuse bees. And the products are advertised as rose and garden insecticides, which are naturally attractive to bees. It only takes a few bees worth of nectar gathering to bring down a colony.

I don't see these products marketed for roses or other flowers. What they're sold as is grub treatment for lawns, (and flea treatments for pets), where the idea is to apply them on the grass then water them into the soil, specifically to not affect bees, butterflies, etc. I've wondered how this would affect ground dwelling bees (badly I assume) but honeybees would appear out of danger. Anyway I'm going to read the original paper now, maybe they say how the problem works

Re: Who would have guessed?

[gzuckier]

Enough neonicotionoid progress and you might have nothing left to eat. Or take turns pollinating the plants that will become your food with a brush.

Some plants -- particularly some that humans have bred for food, selecting bigger tastier food over reproduction potential -- already have impaired pollination features. Thus, pollination is already accomplished manually for some crops.

There are some ways to handle this on an industrial scale, but gardeners often do it by hand with certain plants. All it takes is a little stroll in the garden and some wrist action. Seriously. Years ago my neighbor always did this with his sweet corn plants and referred to it as "having sex with his corn."

True of some farm animals as well. Wouldn't use that quote though.

Re:Who would have guessed?

[plover]

I use Bayer Rose & Flower Insect Killer (http://www.amazon.com/Bayer-502570B-24-Ounce-Ready-Action/dp/B000BQR01A) specifically because it has imidiclopirid on the label. I'm buying it for controlling pests on indoor plants, and I have no concerns about bee pollination. But yes, when the product is named for its use on roses, it's pretty obvious it's going to be used outdoors and will affect bees.

Re:Who would have guessed?

[gzuckier]

I see what you mean. I like the instructions, use when bees are unlikely to be present. Good grief.

Re:Who would have guessed?

[Jmc23]

You should go visit an organic farm somewhere besides the US where the term organic means very little.

Re:Who would have guessed?

[Jmc23]

I see you have bought into the lies hook line and sinker.

A blog post that's just opinion and you get modded insightful?

Aside from your lack of facts, you are blinded by the way in which Organic has been corrupted by the father of lies, the USA.

Re:Who would have guessed?

[Jmc23]

in the USA.

The US government routinely allows agri to poison the citizens. Organic in the US was dictated by large agri. It is just your regular doublespeak that's to be expected in the name of the all mighty dollar.

Re:Who would have guessed?

[Jmc23]

Never heard of permaculture eh?

Here's a hint, the US is not good at farming. It may be good at producing yields but at the cost of destroying taste, texture, the environment, bees, etc...

Re:Who would have guessed?

[Jmc23]

I know eh? What the hell is up with these lazy scientists that can't cram 10 years of experiments into one paper to satisfy the Defenders-of-PROPER-Science on slashdot!

Never done an experiment in your life have you?

Re:Who would have guessed?

[Jmc23]

ah, that's just because in the US the NSA comes and collects the 'data' before someone else can use it against big-agri^H^H^H^H^H^H^H the US gov't

Re:Who would have guessed?

[Anubis IV]

Your inference is incorrect. I never suggested they were lazy, nor would I. I was merely pointing out the extent of their research before Slashdot folks got all up in a tizzy about having found "the" answer.

The 111th explanation...

[pigiron]

for colony collapse. Stay tuned next week for the 112th.

Re:The 111th explanation...

[pigiron]

Then how did we end up with 45 million African-Americans?

Re:The 111th explanation...

[ls671]

Personally, I liked that one:

http://abcnews.go.com/Technolo...

http://www.wptv.com/news/local...

Just search for "zombie bees" to see a bunch of links popping up.

Re:The 111th explanation...

[Aighearach]

for colony collapse. Stay tuned next week for the 112th.

This was one of the original explanations before you "how could insecticides be bad for nice, friendly bees" types got started with the propaganda.

Re:The 111th explanation...

[pigiron]

When did I ever say insecticides were good for bees? The myriad previous explanations for colony collapse have always prominently included various insecticides as part of the reason. Which is what you should learn to do: reason (and learn to read what is actually written while you are at it.)

Re:The 111th explanation...

[Anonymous Coward]

This was always the explanation, it's just not the explanation Monsanto, Syngenta and Bayer wanted. So they talked about nonsense like cell towers, mites and other junk theories rather then admit that this all started right after this new generation of insecticides being introduced. It does raise the interesting question about how these companies can introduce new insecticides without seeing what they do to "good" insects like bees? The preferred corporate solution is to counter this poison with antidotes, and strengthen up the commercial worker bees by feeding them chemicals. These companies cannot be trusted to do due diligence, and the only effective government involvement has been the EU doing a total ban. hopefully less toxic pest fighting products like this will come to market soon: http://www.ted.com/talks/nathan_myhrvold_could_this_laser_zap_malaria .

I'm supporting organics, because it's less likely that I'd be eating small amounts of poison, as well as the corporate ag is really bad science and a scam to take profit from farmers (starting from plowing, fertilizer, seeds, pesticides, etc.). See the science improving: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No-till_farming

Re:The 111th explanation...

[Aighearach]

That's a whole pile of derp. You're saying that even when insecticides was one of 3 main theories, (insecticides, mites, fungus) that it turning out to be... the most common insecticide, that had entered the market at the right time to be responsible, and then became popular... you're saying that is counts as a NEW theory?! Derpderpderp!

So lets not pretend here. It is pretty obvious that I applied reason, and found that the main suspected cause is NOT the 112th new theory. And therefore you're a tobacco-style propagandist.

Re:The 111th explanation...

[pigiron]

"you're a tobacco-style propagandist."

A total non-sequitur. So much for you ability to reason.

As for your ability to comprehend, this is two new and different insecticides and the study has a laughable dearth of data points. Go rant about your organic vegetable garden somewhere else. You're barking up the wrong tree with me.

Re:The 111th explanation...

[Aighearach]

You really need to collect some basic information about this issue. These pesticides are "new" in the sense of having been introduced around the time that the "new" problem of CCD increased. They are also the most popular on the market, so they are the standard thing that is used, not a "new" product in that sense.

Obviously a tobacco-style propagandist isn't going to be able to come up with anything better than complaining about being called that, but then call the other person an organic gardener.

You might have missed this part in your crusade against reason, but I never claimed to support organic gardening, nor did I offer it is a solution, or blame the problem on its dearth. The facts of what is causing CCD are the same regardless of where you are on organic gardening. And in fact, even if you think CCD is fine and don't think it is a problem that needs solving, the facts would still be the same!

You seem to be the wrong tree for a whole lot of things... ;)

The answer is in marketing

[jrumney]

Pesticides need to come with graphic images of deformed bee larvae covering at least 50% of the packaging. And we need to ban pesticide company sponsorship from gardening events (except lawnmower races, they can go a few more years before we ban it from there).

Re:The answer is in marketing

[Anubis IV]

Pesticides need to come with graphic images of deformed bee larvae covering at least 50% of the packaging.

As a non-apiarist, I don't think I'm alone when I say that I'd be wondering why the slimy white things were on the package. I don't even know what healthy bee larvae look like, so how am I supposed to recognize deformed one?

If "the answer is in marketing", I'd strongly suggest they hire someone else to come up with a message that better communicates the point.

Re:The answer is in marketing

[Anonymous Coward]

If you were going for a joke, you failed miserably and should be ashamed.

If you weren't joking... just fucking kill yourself.

so let's suppose you say that to some random internet stranger one day. just like you did a thousand times before. only this time, the person actually does kill themselves. right after reading your post. and you find out about it. how are you supposed to feel?

sure, if they do it so easily they were on the edge anyway. but who is to say they would not have found help and hope if they never read your "recommendation"? how could you ever rule that out? in what way would you bear no guilt at all?

be careful what you wish for.

Re:The answer is in marketing

[93 Escort Wagon]

As a non-apiarist, I don't think I'm alone when I say that I'd be wondering why the slimy white things were on the package. I don't even know what healthy bee larvae look like, so how am I supposed to recognize deformed one?

If "the answer is in marketing", I'd strongly suggest they hire someone else to come up with a message that better communicates the point.

How about a picture of a dead bee with a cigarette hanging out of its tiny little mouth?

Re:The answer is in marketing

[Anonymous Coward]

Different AC here, but I'll put it this way: if you and your ilk killed yourselves, we wouldn't have to read harping posts like the one you just posted.

The air would be fresher, the grass would smell sweeter, ice cream would taste better than it ever had before... well, you get the picture: life would be guilt-free bliss for the rest of us.

Have a nice day!

Re:The answer is in marketing

[MaskedSlacker]

Just keep ignoring that loud wooshing sound over your head.

Re:The answer is in marketing

[sjames]

How about they show happy shiny white families dying of starvation?

Re:The answer is in marketing

[Anonymous Coward]

There needs to be a (-1, Whoosh) mod option.

Re:The answer is in marketing

[MozeeToby]

You jest, but communicating to farmers that "over/misuse of this pesticide may cause collapse of nearby bee colonies resulting in greatly reduced yields" wouldn't be a terrible idea.

Re:The answer is in marketing

[Talderas]

That is one mother fucking badass bee. I must have this product.

Re:The answer is in marketing

[Rich0]

You jest, but communicating to farmers that "over/misuse of this pesticide may cause collapse of nearby bee colonies resulting in greatly reduced yields" wouldn't be a terrible idea.

Honestly, it is the farmer's business to know this. If it isn't in their financial interest to use a particular pesticide, chances are that they'll very quickly figure this out and stop using it.

On the other hand, if you only wish that it wasn't in their interest to use it, then your statement on the packaging won't have much impact.

People do stuff like smoke/etc for personal enjoyment even though they know it will kill them. People don't use pesticides for the fun of it.

Re:The answer is in marketing

[Anonymous Coward]

Good point.

From now on I will only tell right wing bigots and the anti-science crowd to kill themselves. If I somehow hear that one of them has actually taken my advice, I will treat myself to a bottle of champagne in celebration.

this is news???

[rewindustry]

has been all over the papers the past two years, almost, outside northa merkin land..

Re:this is news???

[houstonbofh]

It has been all over the web here too... Of course the news is owned, so it only covers what it is paid to. That is one reason why no one bothers with it anymore.

Re:this is news???

[AK Marc]

The study published last week has been in the news for 2 years? I remember seeing this, and 1000 other theories over the last 2 years, but not too much about studies supporting one over another.

Re:this is news???

[Anubis IV]

outside northa merkin land..

I wasn't aware Harvard was in Europe.

Anyway, this is a recent followup to a 2012 study conducted by the same researchers over the same topic, so, no, this has not been all over the papers for the last two years. This is a new development that helps to further demonstrate their hypothesis.

Re:this is news???

[BitZtream]

Considering this is a second study of the same thing they published in 2012, yea, its been out for 2 years.

Re:this is news???

[Anonymous Coward]

Which part of the sentence, "This study replicated their own research performed in 2012" are you having trouble understanding?

Re:this is news???

[aethelrick]

Wow, that's coming across as arrogant even for slashdot, yes Harvard isn't in Europe, but that dosn't mean the rest of us abstain from scientific research into the effects of neonicotinoids on bees.

The topic HAS indeed been "buzzing" around the news for a while over here (in the UK), it's not new, hell the EU has a two year ban on Neonicotinoids that began in December 2013 BECAUSE of the link between them and CCD, here's a couple of links for you to read to bring you up to speed with the rest of the world.

The ban from the EU... http://www.epa.gov/pesticides/...

Scientists from the University of Stirling in the UK submitted papers for publication in October 2011 in this regard http://www.sciencemag.org/cont...

as did French scientists from the French national institute for agricultural research in http://www.sciencemag.org/cont...

Re:this is news???

[Anubis IV]

Wow, that's coming across as arrogant even for slashdot, yes Harvard isn't in Europe, but that dosn't mean the rest of us abstain from scientific research into the effects of neonicotinoids on bees.

Nor was I suggesting that you guys were coming up short in that regard! Far from it, I quite believe the contrary. I was merely addressing the OP's asinine notion that this news isn't getting disseminated in the US by pointing out that the source of the news is the US, as well as his assertion that this news is old by pointing out that this particular research is brand new.

Once again, by no means was I intending to imply that the US was alone in pursuing CCD research. As you, I was simply contesting the idea that we were uninvolved. And by no means was I suggesting that neonicotinoids were just discovered to be a cause of CCD. Rather, I was pointing out that this particular research is brand new, so it certainly has not been in the news for years.

I apologize for any offense I may have caused, since it was not my intent to offend any well-intentioned people, merely the troll up above.

Re:this is news???

[aethelrick]

I happily adjust my understanding of your words accordingly. Thank you for the clarification.

Re:this is news???

[Anonymous Coward]

How do you get a +5 insightful for a reading comprehension fail?

Seriously, I'd like to know.

Doesn't that put the cat among the pigeons,

[Antony T Curtis]

I wonder how Bayer is going to keep this new study out of their court case where they're suing the EU for banning neonicotinoid pesticides.

Re:Doesn't that put the cat among the pigeons,

[Anonymous Coward]

Lawyers.

Re:Doesn't that put the cat among the pigeons,

[mysidia]

No problem... the research was done after they already had banned it, so the lawyers will argue they can't use it as evidence :)

Re:Doesn't that put the cat among the pigeons,

[ChromeAeonium]

I wonder what will happen to their CCD rates. I doubt there is any one cause to CCD, but this could be a contributing factor, so it will be something to watch.

Re:Doesn't that put the cat among the pigeons,

[Sique]

It doesn't work that way in most of the E.U.. If new evidence pops up that bolster your case, you are free to use it.

Re:Doesn't that put the cat among the pigeons,

[fahrbot-bot]

I wonder how Bayer is going to keep this new study out of their court case where they're suing the EU for banning neonicotinoid pesticides.

Lawyers.

Do these neonicotinoid pesticides work on them too?

Re:Doesn't that put the cat among the pigeons,

[Anonymous Coward]

Nope, generally, lawyers come from outer space and are insensitive to insect poisons.

Re:Doesn't that put the cat among the pigeons,

[Skinkie]

I am a strong believer in the "not one cause" theory. Maybe you find the attached article also enlightening. http://www.plosone.org/article...

Re:Doesn't that put the cat among the pigeons,

[KBehemoth]

Unlikely. Although some species of lawyers are insectoid, the vast majority are reptilian.

Re:Doesn't that put the cat among the pigeons,

[Xest]

Yeah, the EU ban is only temporary by default anyway precisely so they can measure the effects. If they see a noticeable reduction in CCD they'll legislate to make it permanent.

I think they've gone about it the right way - it's a serious enough problem that a ban for a few years to allow the facts to be better established isn't exactly going to be the end of the world, and if it works, good make it permanent, if not, make it legal again.

Re:Doesn't that put the cat among the pigeons,

[Anonymous Coward]

Do these neonicotinoid pesticides work on them too?

Lawyers are the most resilient life on this planet. They seemed to thrive on poisons, accidents, and general discontent. DDT, asbestos, Agent Orange, etc. seem to *breed* lawyers.

Tonopah Rob is a Real Farmer

[teslabox]

Rob the Vegetable Farmer's vegetable farm is in Tonopah, Arizona, and is relatively close to the Palo Verde Nuclear Generating station. He uses companion planting and a communion with his plants and animals to farm without chemical inputs. Specific flowers around the edge of a bed will attract the insects that might otherwise be drawn to eat the plants he plants for humans. Varieties of plants are intersperced with for mutal support and defense. Netting is used to keep birds out of the lettuce. Rob's approach is the implementation of Carrots Love Tomatoes (book about companion planting).

Real Farmers don't need chemicals. Mono-croppers can't do without them. Few people could share Rob's passion for gardening, but we can all learn from his blog.

(there is an obvious retort to this comment, and I wonder how it will manifest. ;)

Re:Tonopah Rob is a Real Farmer

[MightyYar]

Sounds efficient.

Re:Tonopah Rob is a Real Farmer

[Imrik]

It is efficient, depending on how you define efficiency. The yield is higher for the same area, passive defenses remove the need for pesticides and other overhead. The main downside is the difficulty in harvesting the results.

Re:Tonopah Rob is a Real Farmer

[ChromeAeonium]

Real Farmers don't need chemicals.

You're saying the people who produce the most food aren't real farmers? Nice. But yeah, polyculture is great and all in your garden, and intercropping systems are something worthy of more research, sure, but economically scaling it up might be a problem, and even then, it is highly unlikely to be the end of pest problems. The thing with simple solutions is that if they were really that simple everyone already be doing them.

Re:Tonopah Rob is a Real Farmer

[Anonymous Coward]

"Real Farmers don't need chemicals."

I don't think he's doing enough volume to compare him to farmers. At most I suppose you could call him a Real Gardener

Re:Tonopah Rob is a Real Farmer

[Anonymous Coward]

Clear example of the No True Scotsman fallacy.

Re:Tonopah Rob is a Real Farmer

[delt0r]

Now try and feed the world with them rather than half a dozen villages. Its all fine and dandy for people with so much disposable income that they can throw money at feel good food. Even worst is that there is really not data to even back up the feel good claims.

Re:Tonopah Rob is a Real Farmer

[Charliemopps]

Now try and feed the world with them rather than half a dozen villages. Its all fine and dandy for people with so much disposable income that they can throw money at feel good food. Even worst is that there is really not data to even back up the feel good claims.

Right, I do the same stuff this guy does but for fun. I currently have 3ft Tomato plants in Zone 5 and it's may! (bragging) But I have no delusions about my techniques working well enough to feed the entire population. It would drive the cost of food up several orders of magnitude. I'm able to grow enough for my family and to give to food banks, but total collapse of the system is entirely possible. If the wrong pest takes hold, I'm screwed for the summer. Last year we had a crazy overpopulation of rabbits, which I'm already protecting my crops from with some clever fencing. But the rabbits got flees and were so abundant my animals got the flees... then I got the flees. It was terrible. Once you have flees in your bed, pesticides don't seem so bad. But more importantly I just started shooting all the rabbits. The hippie lady next door was pissed, but whatever. You can never make a hippie happy. Long story short, I ate a lot of rabbit over the winter. The cycle of life and all that.

Re:Tonopah Rob is a Real Farmer

[Pinky's Brain]

Just ban the chemicals needed for factory farming and it becomes economical ... we'll need a far greater percentage of our population working on farms though.

Re:Tonopah Rob is a Real Farmer

[Anonymous Coward]

oh bullshit. The yields from all of those stunts are less than 10% by acre that of a modern farm. "Organic" farming is struggling to break 25%.

Re:Tonopah Rob is a Real Farmer

[MightyYar]

Until he invents farming robots to do the manual labor, it is less efficient in terms of human capital. The product is also more expensive.

Re:Tonopah Rob is a Real Farmer

[Anonymous Coward]

we fucking WERE 'doing them' for THOUSANDS OF YEARS, and it worked out fine...
NOW, with BIg Agra controlling the whole situation, THE WHOLE PROCESS HAS BEEN FUCKED...
instead of local, smaller, sustainable, farms which were integrated and had a PROCESS (animals-to-poop-to-fertilizer-to-crops-to-animals, rinse-lather-repeat) THAT WORKS for people (BUT NOT FOR PROFITS OF GIGANTIC RAPACIOUS KORPORATIONS), NOW we have monoculture wastelands, acre-feet of noxious poo lagoons, dousing the landscape repeatedly with chemicals WE HAVE NO CLUE WHAT THE LONG TERM CONSEQUENCES ARE, and generally making a sustainable, small scale process into a system which IS NOT SUSTAINABLE ON ANY LEVEL without the input of HUGE amounts of energy and chemicals...
we need to get back to where the farming is naturally distributed and we work WITH natural processes instead of working against them...
a hundred piggies and their poop on a couple hundred acre farm is a GOLD MINE of precious fertilizer that can be recycled in the soil FOR FUCKING EVER; tens of thousands of piggies crammed into pens, swimming in antibiotics/etc, clouds of noxious dust and fumes, and their chemical-laden wastes filling huge lagoons is NOT A SUSTAINABLE situation, MERELY A TEMPORARILY PROFITABLE ONE FOR ONE SECTOR OF THE ECONOMY...
BIG AGRA IS THE PROBLEM, NOT THE SOLUTION...

Re:Tonopah Rob is a Real Farmer

[Anonymous Coward]

Cool. We can sell it as a jobs program.

Re:Tonopah Rob is a Real Farmer

[AttillaTheNun]

They're farmers, but they aren't farming based on a sustainable model.

Nothing will end pest problems, but appropriate design will mitigate their impact on a system.

Chemical pesticides are less than 100 years old. We got along just fine for beforehand for millennia without them.

Here's another interesting fact - every culture that has adopted "modern" agriculture (i.e. the practice of clear-cutting forest, tilling soil and living primarily on annual (largely mono) crops) have eventually collapsed. All of them. It isn't a long-term sustainable model. Look to the lands of the middle east that were once lush edens for a prime example of how desertification is the end result. Look at the dust bowls of mid-western america as an example of how industrialization has only accelerated this process. Topsoil is the largest export of North America. The midwest prairies once had 6 feet or more of topsoil, until the clearing and tilling began. Contrast the long-term sustainable farming methods of North and South America (i.e. thousands of years), where the ratio of forested to cleared land for cultivating crops and grazing cattle was far different before western culture to what exists today.

The "simple" solutions do work (they aren't simple in any way, however, as it is the complexity of the natural system models and patterns that make them work). Every long-term sustainable culture has relied on them without fail. And I don't buy the usual retort of "try and feed the world with them". There are plenty of documented examples of permanent, sustainable agriculture (i.e. permaculture) systems that provide as much abundance and nutrition per acre. It's just a matter of appropriate system design.

I'll trot out the usual permaculture examples of proven systems and people leading by example:
Sepp Holzer and his Krameterhoff and Holzerhoff farms in Austria
Masanobu Fukuoka, who's system in Japan was rated the top 5% of rice production per acre in the country, yet also yielded an annual crop of barley on the same plot - all using natural methods.
Bill Mollison and the permaculture research institute in Tagari, Tasmania, and the PRI's he and Geoff Lawton have set up world wide, many in some of the most challenging environments in the world (i.e. the salted deserts of Australia and Jordan)
Mark Shepard and his New Forest Farm based in Wisconsin
The large-scale grazing practices based on Alan Savory's work to reverse desertification
etc

Re:Tonopah Rob is a Real Farmer

[pastafazou]

sure, and when crop yields are 25% of what they used to be, resulting in worldwide shortages, starvation, and prices inflating 500%, what do we do then?

Re:Tonopah Rob is a Real Farmer

[Anonymous Coward]

You're saying the people who produce the most food aren't real farmers?

He may not be saying it, but I will. Any farmer who destroys his soil or pollutes the surrounding ecosystem is not a real farmer.

Re:Tonopah Rob is a Real Farmer

[plover]

Did it occur to you even once during your rant that for almost all of the prior "thousands of years" the entire population of the planet was less than that of current day Mexico City? Or that starvation was a significant contributing factor to the average human life-span being about 44 years instead of >70?

The planet is approaching its capacity for humans, and our growth rate is already hugely bolstered by factory production means. Revert us to subsistence farming, and guess what kinds of civil unrest you'll see.

Re:Tonopah Rob is a Real Farmer

[NeutronCowboy]

Congratulations - you just proved that the current agribusiness model is purely based on profit and zero on long-term sustainability, thereby in one shot invalidating both capitalist viewpoints (ownership results in guaranteed long-term care!) and libertarian viewpoints (by the time the agribusiness is done, polyculture is out of business and incapable of providing any sustenance).

Re:Tonopah Rob is a Real Farmer

[Pinky's Brain]

75%.

There is no shortage of arable land in the US, also it doesn't take a whole lot of a reduction in meat consumption to make up the difference. IMO each country in the world has it's own responsibility, also one to provide temporary assistance to other countries ... but not to enable them in self-destructive behaviour.

Mankind as a hole has to stop breeding itself into a fucking pit eventually ... overpopulation of the world is not a good argument to persist in factory farming, it's an argument for birth control. We are already running out of antibiotics ... we'll run out of all magic bullet Xticides eventually.

Re:Tonopah Rob is a Real Farmer

[ChromeAeonium]

Are you volunteering to be the one to pull weeds and squash bugs in the hot summer sun for hours on end and then shoulder the immense cost increases that would bring? Or are those burdens for the sweat and blood of 'other' people so that you can live comfy and judge the hand that feeds you? Because if you are willing, find your nearest farm and sign on up. I'm sure the farmer would be thrilled to save a few bucks on inputs while you spend your days doing backbreaking labor for dirt cheap.

Re:Tonopah Rob is a Real Farmer

[ChromeAeonium]

They're farmers, but they aren't farming based on a sustainable model.

And decreasing efficiency is sustainable? We don't have infinite land you know, everything has a cost, and if you lose efficiency, you lose wild land. Somehow, that sounds less sustainable than various chemical inputs.

Chemical pesticides are less than 100 years old. We got along just fine for beforehand for millennia without them.

I stopped reading at the point where you forgot that the past couple thousand years have been plagued by constant threat of famine. Out of sight, out of mind. Kinda crazy how detached people are from agriculture these days.

Re:Tonopah Rob is a Real Farmer

[Pinky's Brain]

Not too different from jobs I've had in the past ... not ones I relish, but then there are lots of jobs in this world I don't relish ... but not a lot I wouldn't do when broke and with few options.

Did I suggest it should be done by slave labour?

Re:Tonopah Rob is a Real Farmer

[the plant doctor]

+5 Informative? With a statement like this?

Chemical pesticides are less than 100 years old. We got along just fine for beforehand for millennia without them.

You'd best edit Wikipedia, quickly, then! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P...

Chemical pesticides date back 4,500 years, when the Sumerians used sulfur compounds as insecticides. The Rig Veda, which is about 4,000 years old, also mentions the use of poisonous plants for pest control.

Re:Tonopah Rob is a Real Farmer

[AttillaTheNun]

The dustbowl wasn't a one-time event - soil erosion on a massive scale continues to this day, and is a world wide problem:
http://www.globalchange.umich....

You want sustainable efficiency?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P...

This is a design system that is not only sustainable, but improves fertility and efficiency over time. Rather than design a system based on multiple inputs and a single yield, you design it based on the interaction of a complex web of natural systems and the yield is the surplus.

"Permaculture is a philosophy of working with, rather than against nature; of protracted and thoughtful observation rather than protracted and thoughtless labor; and of looking at plants and animals in all their functions, rather than treating any area as a single product system." - Bill Mollison [4]

Want actual references to working systems? Here's the best example: Sepp Holzer
http://www.celsias.com/article...

Want more? See my original post.

Scalability? "If anybody ever suggests that permaculture does not scale, just
point to Willie Smits." - Paul Wheaton

Re:Tonopah Rob is a Real Farmer

[AttillaTheNun]

Kinda crazy how detached people are from natural systems.

Which seems more sustainable to you?

this?
http://climatevoices.files.wor...

or this?
http://www.savannainstitute.or...
http://citygrownurbanagricultu...
http://www.permaculturenews.or...

STOP TAINTING HONEY!

[Anonymous Coward]

I eat real honey...

Real honey doesn't mess with my stomach or head, doesn't make my teeth hurt like sugar and other sweeteners do (artificial AND natural).

In the last year in Colorado the honey has been tainted... it has an off-honey sweet that most people cannot taste and after 3 - 4 days of using it, my bad teeth just go nuts with pain and issues. Both Western Slope brand and Beeyond the Hive honey have caused this reaction and I've since switched to crappy commercial honey's that have proven to be clean so far.

I'm seriously hoping they find the issue and fix it... honey is my primary sweetener and paying $100/mo intstead of $50/mo for 'sweet' is criminal.

Thanks!

Re:STOP TAINTING HONEY!

[Anonymous Coward]

If your teeth are bad, my god man stop eating honey!

Re:STOP TAINTING HONEY!

[ThatAblaze]

Hmm... I think I might know why

Ban Them!

[Anonymous Coward]

If the pesticides are causing CCD, and Bees contribute to about 40% of the food crop, then ban the insecticides yesterday. FULL STOP! Shell petroleum, and Bayer pharmaceuticals combined do not contribute the equivalent of 40% of the North American food crop, let alone the world food crop. They made this crap, fine. We won't revoke licenses for these businesses to operate, but ban the pesticides. Oh but pushback on the ban and we might consider banning these companies operating in North America (gas/medicine/whatever).

Nice, but not everywhere neonicotinoids are used

[ArcherB]

Australia uses neonicotinoids and they have no bee collapse problems.

Yes, I know the source is a chemical company, but they have a point. Bee collapse is not a problem in Australia.

There is also this:
On the other hand, in Canada and Australia, there is no sign of Colony Collapse Disorder. ...
Despite the fact that neonicotinoids are widely used in Canada to protect canola from pests, Canadian bee populations have been largely unaffected and produce around 50 million pounds of canola honey. ...
For example, in upland areas of Switzerland where the pesticide is not used, bee colony populations are under significant pressure from the mites; and in France, declines in the bee population in mountainous areas (where neonics are uncommon) are similar to those in agricultural areas (where neonics are widely used).

Re:I had a bee swarm in my backyard

[Anonymous Coward]

sigh. Capturing a splinter colony is not an easy task. $350 to capture it.

Bayer says everything is OK

[Swampash]

The company behind Zyklon B wouldn't lie!

Re:Bayer says everything is OK

[JaredOfEuropa]

Zyclon B was originally used as a pesticide as well, specifically to fumigate houses if I remember correctly. Only later did certain people discover its "other" use.

Re:Bayer says everything is OK

[Rich0]

Zyclon B was originally used as a pesticide as well, specifically to fumigate houses if I remember correctly. Only later did certain people discover its "other" use.

To be fair, almost all nerve gases and such have their origins in the pesticide space. Figuring out how to kill pests is a perfectly legitimate use of science, but unfortunately one that is almost impossible to divorce from chemical weapons research. The goal of scientists is obviously to find compounds that don't have a huge impact on people, but inevitably they'll find ones that do, and while they'll usually steer away from them, knowledge once gained is never lost.

None of this can be used to excuse companies that knowingly collaborated in genocide. However, the scientists who first discover most of these compounds usually have nothing to do with how they eventually end up being used.

Re:Nice, but not everywhere neonicotinoids are use

[Anonymous Coward]

Different bees, no winter to contend with, different ecosystem around the bees, different other pesticides/threats used in the US that aren't allowed in Australia, US beekeepers give their bees HFCS instead of their own honey to survive the winter ... there are about a million factors that could be unique to the US that make the bees susceptible to the neonicotinoids.

Perhaps US agriculture would do well to copy, line for line, the rules and regulations surrounding farming of a country that isn't having a problem with colony collapse.

Organic bees

[Uncle Robert]

In the late 90's I heard a interview with a organic bee keeper on NPR who said that organic bees do not have this problem. A few day later I was listening the the Art Bell Show when he was interviewing USDA representative. Art had a field on his website for sending comments to be read on the air so I posted a comment about the NPR interview and suggested that maybe there was a change in the pesticide/fungicide/herbicides that are being used now and perhaps that should be looked into. He actually read it to her and she became outraged and said that organic bee keepers have no control over their bees. She did not however refute the claim that organic bees do not have this problem though. So I think the solution is known they just don't want to accept it.

Re:Organic bees

[Anonymous Coward]

Bah, organic bees... Give me good quality non-organic bees any day of the week. Stainless steel bodies, carbon fiber wings, titanium stingers, and packed to the thorax with military grade drone electronics. Yeah, now THOSE are bees!!!

Re:Organic bees

[93 Escort Wagon]

I believe you've just described a Tracker Jacker.

Re:Organic bees

[Uncle Robert]

You make a good point, perhaps DARPA is developing cyber bees which are immune to pesticide/fungicide/herbicides.

Re:Nice, but not everywhere neonicotinoids are use

[ArcherB]

Different bees, no winter to contend with, different ecosystem around the bees
Did you not read the part about Canada? I believe they have a winter on occasion.

Re:It must be bad!

[dimko]

Not sure if we on same boat with captain Obvious or we are rolling with captain Trolling.

Re:Nice, but not everywhere neonicotinoids are use

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know where you're getting your information but CCD is definitely a problem in Canada, at least in Ontario. My brother keeps bees there and I was just talking to him about it the other day.

Re:I had a bee swarm in my backyard

[Anonymous Coward]

My mum had a bee swarm move into her backyard and make a nest in one of the trees. She got rid of it by calling up a apiarist who advertised in the local paper about free bee hive removal. He came along, smoked the hive then bagged the whole lot up to take back to his property. This guy is one of many that had advertisements for this service. The only time it would actually cost to get the hive removed is if they had to dismantle part of a building to get at the hive and that cost is to cover the cost of a carpenter/builder to destruct and reconstruct the dismantled part of the building.

This is in Australia though.

To be honest though, I really don't see anyone wanting to pay you to attempt to capture a swarm of bees that may not even be there when they come to pick it up. And given that people have always paid to have hives removed from their property, it is going to be a while before someone pays you to have the opportunity to recover a hive from your property...

Re:I had a bee swarm in my backyard

[Anonymous Coward]

Call a local beekeeping club. ALL Members in our club remove them for free and take the bees away. You should never pay to have bees removed. PLUS
if you try to sell them to be removed - Good Luck!

Re:I had a bee swarm in my backyard

[Anonymous Coward]

You obviously have no knowledge of bee swarms and their behavior. They are easier to handle than any hived bees.
Trying to charge someone to remove bees makes you a joke!! Our club removes them for free & takes the bees away...

Re:I had a bee swarm in my backyard

[Anonymous Coward]

It snowed at my house last week, therefore, Global Warming is a hoax. . .

Re:Nice, but not everywhere neonicotinoids are use

[Anonymous Coward]

Your retort makes no sense.

By the way, is your last name "Midland"?

Re:Nice, but not everywhere neonicotinoids are use

[Anonymous Coward]

Clearly it's a complex problem and all aspects need to looked at throughly and discussed freely.

Actual nicotine is also used as a pesticide

[XNormal]

Actual nicotine is also used as a pesticide - in "organic" agriculture. I wouldn't be surprised if it has exactly the same effect if used at large scale.

Re:Actual nicotine is also used as a pesticide

[will_die]

Actually organic pesticides are far worse. Neonicatines are a family of pesticides that are focused on certain insect types. Nicotine will kill everything and does so very, very good. It will also kill pets, animals, humans, etc which is why modern pesticides are prefered.

Re:Nice, but not everywhere neonicotinoids are use

[Anonymous Coward]

There is also this:
On the other hand, in Canada and Australia, there is no sign of Colony Collapse Disorder. ...
Despite the fact that neonicotinoids are widely used in Canada to protect canola from pests, Canadian bee populations have been largely unaffected and produce around 50 million pounds of canola honey. ...

How do you then explain this mere months later?

Thereâ(TM)s been another rash of bee deaths in Ontario, where commercial beekeepers are on the ropes with losses of upwards of 85 per cent.

The presence of neonicotinoid pesticides in dead bees collected from last yearâ(TM)s die-off triggered both a review by Canadaâ(TM)s Pest Management Regulatory Agency and a more recent bee deaths investigation committee struck by the province of Ontario.

As far as I can tell the 'no CCD in Canada' things is from a declaration of beeskeepers' association in 2007. Please stop using out of date information.

Re:Nice, but not everywhere neonicotinoids are use

[sjames]

The studies showed that the mechanism of action seems to be that the neonicotinoids render the hives more susceptible to common parasites. So if those parasites are less common somewhere, CCD will also be less common even in the presence of neonicotinoids.

That still suggests that wherever the parasites are common, the neonicotinoids should not be used.

Re:Nice, but not everywhere neonicotinoids are use

[Anonymous Coward]

"Australia uses neonicotinoids and they have no bee collapse problems."

There are some differences in Australia:
1. The low pressure air seeders vent directly into the furrow. Airborne contaminated dust is negligible.
2. Neonics are not an approved foliar spray in Australia (ie: less use when it can be most damaging) (An alternate but related insecticide is available but has clear warnings about toxicity to bees and has clear instructions on when to avoid spraying and how to minimise chance of contact.)
3. Australia does not have Varroa mite, removing a major stress for bees.
4. Supplemental feeding is much less common, and feeding with HFCS extremely rare.
5. Hives are generally less mobile, largely because of the next point
6. Australian bee keepers make the majority of their money from honey production, pollination services are a side business (Pretty much the opposite of the US)
7. Australia has a significant population of wild European bees, Asian bees and other native pollinators.
8. While Australia has milder winters, it is still significant events for the bees in the areas where they are normally kept. However drought can also be a significant stress.

Re: We found no evidence

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, I know the source is a chemical company, but they have a point.

"We found no evidence" does not mean there is no evidence, it means no evidence was found. The question is, do you trust them to be looking in the right place?

Mod this up

[MyNicknameSucks]

As above.

Organic farms do use pesticides

[sjbe]

The point of organic farming is NOT to use any pesticides

Organic farms frequently DO use pesticides and in fact eliminating the use of pesticides completely is extremely challenging.

Nothing wrong with organic farming methods but what people think is involved with organic farming and how it really is conducted can differ greatly. Organic means very specific things but what it doesn't mean is just as important. There are enormous loopholes in what organic means and other terms like "natural" essentially mean nothing at all.

Right

[Anonymous Coward]

EMF radiation was always the explanation, it's just not the explanation Verizon, Sprint and AT&T wanted. So they talked about nonsense like pesticides, mites and other junk theories.

Useful doesn't equal good idea

[sjbe]

While actual evidence would be good, it will likely never be "proven" in the same way that for fifty years, smoking was never "proven" to cause lung cancer.

Smoking was firmly shown to be a cause of lung cancer and other diseases decades ago. Once you do enough studies and control for enough variables you can very clearly pin down the aggregate effect of smoking across a population. While you often cannot establish that smoking caused a specific cancer in a specific individual with 100% certainty, you can very easily determine with a high sigma level of confidence (>3sigma) the effect on a population as a whole.

Imidaclopirid is a really useful insecticide, and I am not at all thrilled that it might be completely banned.

DDT is a really useful pesticide. Doesn't mean using it is a good idea. There are plenty of things that are useful but have side effects that preclude their use for their intended purpose. Would you prefer that we start hand pollination instead?

Perhaps instead of banning it, they could increase the number of beehives by a factor of ten?

Exactly how do you propose to do this when the populations of bees are falling now?

Or maybe they could breed imidaclopirid-resistant bees?

Probably easier and safer to simply use a different pesticide. If indeed this stuff is affecting bees negatively, odds are very good it has other negative effects as well. Bees are FAR more vital to modern agriculture as well as the environment overall than this family of pesticides.

Re:Useful doesn't equal good idea

[plover]

What I meant by the smoking analogy was that certain interested parties are likely to drag this out in the courts to preserve their business model. Big Tobacco dragged the debate out for four decades before acknowledging that smoking causes cancer. I expect Bayer and the other agribusinesses will attempt to do the same with these pesticides (as they have already fought such battles in the EU.)

I know that everything has side effects, I'm wondering if there alternatives other than a simple ban. Can we live with the consequences of these pesticides?

The study ties neonicotinoids to CCD in a certain percentage of colonies, but it doesn't appear to impact all of them. If we know why it's not 100% fatal, maybe we can use that to our advantage - keep the insecticide while also keeping the bees. Two naive ways that might work are increasing the number of bees and winning through statistics, or breeding resistance into the bees. Smarter people than me can probably come up with a dozen more. I also have no idea if they'd work (what is the maximum density of colonies in a field? How many colonies can apiarists produce in a year?) But I really like the idea of an effective insecticide that doesn't cause harm to the rest of the food chain.

Re:Useful doesn't equal good idea

[Jmc23]

Smoking was firmly shown to be a cause of lung cancer and other diseases decades ago. Once you do enough studies and control for enough variables you can very clearly pin down the aggregate effect of smoking across a population. While you often cannot establish that smoking caused a specific cancer in a specific individual with 100% certainty, you can very easily determine with a high sigma level of confidence (>3sigma) the effect on a population as a whole.

Did you know that big tobacco has scientifically 'proven' that chocolate chip cookies are more carcinogenic than tabacco?

Of course, tobacco itself has very little to do with what is sold as cigarettes by US companies.

Refined Nicotine

[Grand Facade]

What could go wrong?

Re:Refined Nicotine

[Sique]

I would stay away from Vitamin B3 then. This is also "refined Nicotine" (Nicotinamid resp. Nicotinamid Acid). Substances are especially poisonous to us if they are closely related to substances that are an integral part of our metabolism.

Re:Refined Nicotine

[The123king]

They're not always poisonous, but it's often a good place to start. Look at the many psychoactive drugs, which are chemically similar to neurotransmitters.

If it's similar, but not the same, chances are it will fuck you up.

Re:Nice, but not everywhere neonicotinoids are use

[c]

Did you not read the part about Canada? I believe they have a winter on occasion.

It's more accurate to say that we have summer on occasion.

Re:Nice, but not everywhere neonicotinoids are use

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, Canada has famously balmy winters. Tropical even!

It wasn't climate disruption?

[jlgreer1]

I guess it wasn't due to climate disruption as all os the selective skeptic scientists have been saying....

Re:It wasn't climate disruption?

[geekoid]

Or did they say the may be the result of changing climate, more research is needed?

I will also add the 2 studies by the same group is hardly conclusive.
I, and every one I know, hopes to hell it some pesticide we can ban as opposed to climate change.

" selective skeptic scientists"
That is a nonsense statement.

Study is consistent with the way neonics work.

[walterbyrd]

This study should come as no surprise to those who have followed the issue. In fact, I think neonics have already been banned in parts of Europe, if not all of Europe.

For those that don't know about this, what happens is: bees, sometimes by the millions, fly off from their hives, and never come back. Such behavior has been unheard of until fairly recently. This starting happening soon after the widespread use of neonics.

This would be consistent with the way neonics work. Neonics do not directly kill the insects. Rather, neonics affect the nervous system of the insects, and the insect dies because it cannot take care of itself. It has been long theorized that bees with damaged nervous systems cannot navigate back to their hives.

Re:Study is consistent with the way neonics work.

[the eric conspiracy]

The problem is that the bans haven't stopped bee colony collapse.

And some places that use these pesticides heavily don't have bee colony collapse. Like Canada and Australia.

I'm sorry, but the Harvard study involving a mere 16 colonies is farcical when compared to the real extent and complexity of the issues here.

Re:Study is consistent with the way neonics work.

[geekoid]

I wouldn't use thing being banned in Europe as any type of bar. They tend to ban thing specifically on public protests and not on any actual facts.

Lets see some other group replicate these results, assuming they are good studies. I haven't read the study.

Re:Nice, but not everywhere neonicotinoids are use

[swillden]

Did you not read the part about Canada? I believe they have a winter on occasion.

It's more accurate to say that we have summer on occasion.

A dubious claim.

Re:Nice, but not everywhere neonicotinoids are use

[Anonymous Coward]

My experience in Western Australia, with bees, is that mine used tree flowers mainly for their sources.
In general farmers were not spraying the wildflowers and native trees, and the orchards I had them in were small backyard orchards.

So this needs much more careful analysis

Re:Nice, but not everywhere neonicotinoids are use

[pastafazou]

no, we don't have winter on occasion. We have summer on occasion.

Scaling and economic cost

[sjbe]

Chemical pesticides are less than 100 years old. We got along just fine for beforehand for millennia without them.

With a FAR larger percent of the work force involved in farming and with FAR lower crop yields. Chemical pesticides are not desirable for obvious reasons but they do have a dramatic effect on the productivity of a piece of land for a given input of dollars. We got along without them because we didn't have access to them but there was a huge economic price paid in the process.

every culture that has adopted "modern" agriculture (i.e. the practice of clear-cutting forest, tilling soil and living primarily on annual (largely mono) crops) have eventually collapsed. All of them.

Horseshit. That is nothing more than unsubstantiated nonsense.

Look to the lands of the middle east that were once lush edens for a prime example of how desertification is the end result.

The lands of the middle east have been desert for for far longer than you seem to imply and they did not become desert because of human activity. Your "lush edens" were narrow river valleys (that still exist) which supported far smaller populations. Egyptian civilization grew in the Nile river valley and not outside of it - a fact that hasn't changed substantially to this day.

Look at the dust bowls of mid-western america as an example of how industrialization has only accelerated this process.

You are talking about something that happened 80 years ago as if nobody learned anything.

And I don't buy the usual retort of "try and feed the world with them". There are plenty of documented examples of permanent, sustainable agriculture (i.e. permaculture) systems that provide as much abundance and nutrition per acre

Convenient how you leave cost out of your equation there. Sure, you can do all kinds of interesting and productive agriculture if you don't consider the economic cost of doing so or if you can sell the product to wealthy consumers at Whole Foods. Furthermore many techniques do not scale easily. Any discussion of fancy food production methods HAS to include a price tag or it is nothing more than an academic exercise.

Communists

[scarboni888]

Sounds like some kind of communist scam designed to cut into the nicotinoid producers. We've seen this sort of anti-democratic behavior before what with the chlorofluorocarbons, leaded gasoline, DDT, asbestos and the like. Pretty soon it'll be nobody can make an honest buck anymore!!

pyrethin/permethrin kitty danger

[Anonymous Coward]

permethrin(lice treatment/flying insect sprays) is fatal to cats but pyrethin from the flower itself should not be.
Unless you want to kill cats by heart attacks, don't use permethrin where the cat might explore. The stuff is also used in anti tick shampoo for dogs. Cats are the only animal susceptible.

Re:pyrethin/permethrin kitty danger

[onkelonkel]

So, how much permethrin would I need to not use to avoid accidentally killing my neighbours cat?

Re:Nice, but not everywhere neonicotinoids are use

[Anonymous Coward]

I thought that I also heard of a case in vancouver where a mall sprayed trees in the parking lot while they were in flowering bloom. Within days the parking lot was covered in dead bees. Sorry no link to the story as I was listening to CBC radio.

 

Wasps

[Anonymous Coward]

Why can't this kill of wasps just as effectively? Maybe mosquitoes too.

But no, those bastards are all over the place.

What about Australia?

[Anonymous Coward]

So does this study explain why you don't see CCD in Australia where use of neonicotinoids is rampant?

notion?

[rewindustry]

i was thinking the last six months to a year, actually, and this research and/or similar information really has been all over the international BBC feeds for at least that long.

i don't even know what asinine means, let alone OP, but i do not get the impression you are being very polite.

Re:notion?

[Anubis IV]

i was thinking the last six months to a year, actually

Then perhaps you shouldn't have said that this "has been all over the papers the past two years". You'll have to pardon me for taking what you said at face value, rather than understanding that by "two years" you meant "last six months to a year". Even so, considering the research only came out last week, I still find it unlikely that it was getting reported six months to a year ago. Related research has certainly been in the news for years, as you later clarified, but this research produced new findings and has certainly not been reported for that long.

i don't even know what asinine means, let alone OP, but i do not get the impression you are being very polite.

OP means "original poster", referring to the person who started the thread. It's a term in general use on the Internet and doesn't have any negative connotation associated with it. It was simply a way of referring to you. On the other hand, "asinine" is a word you can find in the dictionary, and means "extremely stupid or foolish". I would consider it appropriate for referring to what you asserted, given that you had made a patently untrue claim. Likewise, "troll" was not being used in a positive light when I applied the term to you.

And you're quite correct that I was not being very polite, but when someone makes unsubstantiated and untrue claims about another's country while referring to it in a derogatory manner, you shouldn't expect a polite response.

Re:notion?

[rewindustry]

the possibility that neocotinoids are the main cause of colony collapse has been all over the news in the past two years, outside of north america.

even the new york times picked up on this - http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03...

the harvard research in question has been mentioned, off an on, over the past six months, to a year at perhaps most.

politely - are you sure of what you are claiming?

Re:notion?

[Anubis IV]

are you sure of what you are claiming?

Quite.

As I've already clarified, this particular research was a followup to their earlier research, is brand new, and was not in the news prior to last week. The old research is what was previously in the news. A quick glance at the article will show you that this research is new and more firmly establishes what they had asserted in their previous research, but yes, that old research was indeed circulated at the time that it was published.

That neonicotinoids are a likely culprit has indeed been in the news for a few years and did not originate from Harvard, but it has been getting reported in the US, hence my dismissal of your idea that it's not being reported here (that you can link a NYT article from two years ago on the topic is proof of that).

we should agree

[rewindustry]

to disagree - i still feel the information has been suppressed, for the most part, in north american media, for far too long.