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Bees Prefer Nectar Laced With Neonicotinoids
Taco Cowboy writes: Neonicotinoids are a class of neuro-active insecticides chemically similar to nicotine. Neonicotinoids kill insects by overwhelming and short-circuiting their central nervous systems (PDF). Shell and Bayer started the development of neonicotinoids back in the 1980s and 1990s. Since this new group of pesticides came to market, the bee population has been devastated in regions where they have been widely used. Studies from 2012 linked neonicotinoid use to crashing bee populations.
New studies, however, have discovered that bees prefer nectar laced with neonicotinoids over nectar free of any trace of neonicotinoids. According to researchers at Newcastle University, the bees may "get a buzz" from the nicotine-like chemicals in the same way smokers crave cigarettes.
New studies, however, have discovered that bees prefer nectar laced with neonicotinoids over nectar free of any trace of neonicotinoids. According to researchers at Newcastle University, the bees may "get a buzz" from the nicotine-like chemicals in the same way smokers crave cigarettes.
buzz off
Don't tell the NeoCons, they'll have all the bees rounded up and put in jail because getting buzzed is immoral if nobody is paying for it.
Innocent people shouldn't be forced to pay for inferior software development.
--"Code Complete" Microsoft Press
I see what you did there...
Tomacco!
Thanks to Bayer and Shell, good luck finding untainted samples...
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
kill bayer, shell ?
People and other living beings have a habit of craving the very things that ruin them.
"Set a man a fire, he'll be warm for the rest of the night. Set a man afire, he'll be warm for the rest of his life."
Similarly, open containers of antifreeze (left outside after flushing a car's cooling system) have long presented a danger to wild and domestic animals due to the 'sweetness' of the antifreeze.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethylene_glycol_poisoning
Ethylene Glycol is also used in other engine maintenance fluids -most notable in de-icers, which is the source of most of the ethylene glycol which is released in the environment
However, except for the dumping of the de-icer, it is probably not as widespread in the environment as the neonics are
-I'm just sayin'
Poison everything. I stopped using insecticides many years ago. Monsanto had a large display at Disneyland boasting about their use and how effective the products were. The chemicals are slow to break down and pollute the environment for years. There are are still a few honey bees in my yard, haven't seen a Bumblebee in years.
So what you're saying is... *sunglassses* they get a buzz out of it?
Yeeeaaaa- no.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
The study compared Neonicotinoids laced pollen to sugar water. Which means it was not a fair comparison. There needs to be a comparison between Neonicotinoids laced pollen and unlaced pollen.
No, the study compared neonicotinoid-laced sugar water with sugar water:
(If you follow the "bees prefer nectar laced with neonicotinoids" link in the /. article and then the "the insects tended to eat more of the contaminated food" link from the article you get to after following that link, you can read the paper without going through a paywall.)
So, no, it's not a comparison between neonicotinoid-laced pollen and pollen, but it's also not a comparison between (neonicotinoid-laced) pollen and sugar water.
"The study compared Neonicotinoids laced pollen to sugar water."
What are you talking about??
From the actual paper in Nature: "bees of both species prefer to eat more of sucrose solutions laced with IMD or TMX than sucrose alone."
http://www.nature.com/nature/j...
Avantslash: low-bandwidth mobile slashdot.
The study compared Neonicotinoids laced pollen to sugar water.
The published study offered the bees a choice between a sucrose solution with neonicotinoids and another sucrose solution without neonicotinoids. It was a fair comparison.
replying to undo mod. ignore.
I hear that bees, like people, absolutely love microwave radiation. Some bees call it BeeMeth, but I imagine they are working on a more catchy name.
Grey, from the smog.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Colony collapse disorder (CCD) has been linked in studies to insecticides, pollution, climate change, GMO crops, viruses, fungi, and on and on. Unfortunately, those are merely statistically correlative links and the actual cause of CCD has yet to be determined.
The Nature article examined the neurophysiological response of bees to three of the most common neonicotinoid pesticides. They determined that the bee taste system cannot detect these chemicals, and additionally the chemicals have no influence on the bee's ability to recognize sugar. This means the bees preference for food with these substances results from interaction with their central nervous system. Considering that nicotine is a CNS stimulant, this makes perfect sense.
You didn't like the conclusion of the article, so you read it with the single intent of refuting it. When you found one thing that you thought you could use as an attack, you picked on that. It did not occur to you that the people who do this kind of research are extremely knowledgeable and would would never make that kind of foolish error.
You have revealed your true colors. You are willfully ignorant and have no regard for the truth. You were effectively accusing the authors of fraudulent research. Accusing others of lying to achieve their goals shows that you are a dishonest yourself, because that is the logic of habitual liars.
Why is Snark Required?
The makers of neonicitinoid pesticides have billions in profits to protect, they will not let something like the death of our number one food crop pollinator get in their way
enhancing shareholder value or something like that
Wherever You Go, There You Are
Then we'll have cause to sue monsanto, right?
I have a rhododendron in bloom outside my kitchen window. Normally it would be abuzz with bees. This year I see only houseflies and ants.
Good catch, it is amazing how quickly people accept outright lies
I notice a rapid response to any negative articles on neonicitinoid products, it seems similar in tone and tactic to anti-global warming noise
Wherever You Go, There You Are
I know they're still pretty new, but has anyone looked into the health effects on bees of the new e-Neonicotinoids?
The EU banned three neonicotinoids that are judged especially high risk for bees 17 months ago. If this is causing/contributing to colony collapse disorder, evidence should start settling this question over the next year or two I would think.
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
So that's why I see bumble bees trying really goddamn hard to try to crawl inside of the little blossoms on my pepper plants* that they totally don't fit inside of at all.
It reminds me of myself, shaking down the couch for change for tobacco money before ATMs and credit cards became commonplace. Or rather, groping for the cigarette at the bottom of the recliner that I can see with a flashlight, but can't reach at all without looking like a monkey fucking a football and even then it isn't easy.
Or, as Rammstein said, "like an elephant in the eye of the needle." Whatever, you get my point.
*: Pepper plants, as all nightshades, produce nicotine in their foliage and presumably their flowers.
Kid-proof tablet..
Is this a Bayer or Shell astroturfer here to spread disinfo?
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Why bees tend to hang around right outside the doors of office buildings.
And the unusual weather has nothing to do with it?
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Deadly chemicals used on purpose to kill things continue to kill things besides what they were aimed at. Not really a shock.
Supporter of the +1 Over Dramatic mod option. In memory of apk.
Thanks to Bayer and Shell, good luck finding untainted samples...
So your knee-jerk response is to blame flawed science on "BIG EVIL KORPARASHUNS!!!!"
Tell us, what color is the sky on your world?
No, I'm well aware of how agribusiness works, and how commissioned salesmen actually do a lot of work to sell as much product as possible. Much of my extended family is in farming, either as farmers, or as those who sell products or services to farmers.
Farmers want the best yields possible. They assume that the products advertised to them are acceptable, and they use those products widely if they seem to solve the ill that the farmer was fighting against. As such, it's very likely that Bayer and Shell have managed to sell this product to loads and loads of farmers.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
"New studies, however ..." as if the following news counters the previous one. So "liking" counters "short circuiting"? I am a simple man and don't understand.
"Used to introduce a statement that contrasts with or seems to contradict something that has been said previously.".
How hard is it for the editors to include a link to the actual paper?
Please upvote or this will never get addressed.
Well done gentlemen; best string of replies I've seen in awhile. If I didn't see all those UIDs I woulda thought it wasn't ad lib!
Serious corporate shills; Beware! Your fate may not be as pleasant as the above... Proceed with caution.
So maybe the farmers are evil, too ?
Or is it we, the lazy consumers who want cheap food and no manual labor on the fields ?
Just asking.
Welcome to the western world. I assume you are an alien from Planet FairTopia and this is your first day here.
We are a bunch of aggressive, lazy and sometimes highly nasty beings. We have fun in lying at each other and cheer when our victims jump off a bridge based on those lies.
That doesn't mean it wasn't flawed.
Bees don't drink sugar water in nature.
The checking of the 'taste' of neonics is only one aspect that needs tested.
Is this masked by non-taste responses to normal nectar?
Dateline 2015: Scientists finally decode honeybee "dance" language. First message recorded:
"Man, I'm really jonesing for some of that nicotine-laced nectar. Can you watch the hive for a bit while I take a break? I'm gettin' the shakes."
In the referenced Nature paper, the authors describe measurements they made on honey bee and bumble bee neurons in response to sugar with and without the neonicotinoid compounds. As I also stated, they also checked if the presence of the insecticides had any impact on the way the insects detect sugar. It did not.
Understand this: they inserted electrodes into nerve fibers that bees use to "taste" what they are consuming. Using these electrodes they monitored the nerve signals going to the bees brain. By varying the concentration of insecticides over a range starting at zero, they were able to show that there was no difference in the response related to the amount of the chemical they were testing. The paper has charts and graphs with error bars and correlation (p) values. It's real science done by real scientists, who know that their academic reputation depends on avoiding mistakes.
This is not a high school "science experiment" with a bunch of bees free flying in a cage with two sources of sugar and a student counting the number of bees going to one or the other. The experiment is based on a fundamental understanding at the neurological level of how bees function. It has nothing to do with nectar.
Your criticism is based on a level of understanding that is extremely childish. Are you actually that uninformed? You are not asking relevant question, but making assertions based in ignorance. Even given the generally low quality of analytical thinking shown on Slashdot, you lack of knowledge is pathetic. Normally I would say that you should look at the paper, but in your case I expect that there are too many big words that you would not understand.
Why is Snark Required?
I'm sorry, but calling flagging a "troll" because they misread an article is beyond the pale. None of their behavior was "trollish". Saying that a study is flawed is in no way shape or form engaging in "fraudulent research", aka, deliberately falsifying data to push an agenda.
The Nature article appears to be down. But I have to caution, studying bee behavior is very difficult. Many of our senses, bees lack or have only at low resolution. But they have a number of senses that we don't. They see UV. They see polarized light. They sense electric fields. They're sensitive to a lot of chemicals that we cannot detect. And so forth. It's very, very easy to accidentally give bees signals, which will alter their behavior, that you didn't realize you were giving. I'd like how they attempted to control for all of this, but unfortunately that's not possible now.
"...but Republicans plan to come back with a new plan, where they just slash the tires on all the ambulances."
I'd really like to read the paper but unfortunately it's down. But for example, do the neonicotinoids add a UV signature to the liquid not present in the sugar water? That would have little to no influence in the case of flowers in nature (where they're not looking at the nectar, and there's all sorts of other chemicals in the nectar). What other chemicals are in the neonicotinoid solution (they're rarely pure, they usually have all sorts of other chemicals to increase their effect)? What's their cleaning and handling procedure for preparing and filling the sample containers? I want to know how they controlled these experiments against factors that humans can't detect but bees absolutely can.
Just the very act of hooking electrodes up to bee neurons I'd have concerns about. Is there any induced electric field involved, or even rubbing against the bee hairs? Bees transfer information to one another via dances, such as the waggle dance. Bees build up an electrostatic charge on their body, and a waggling bee imposes an electrostatic force on the antennae and hairs of all adjacent bees, causing them to feel dance over a short distance. Their stereoscopic sense of the dance lets them know the direction, and that combined with the time allows them to work out a direction to a food source relative to the (moving) direction of the sun. It functions like transferring a memory from one be to another. There's also "negation" behaviors, by other bees who don't like the information giving out; they have a different frequency buzz to say "don't go there", and sometimes different bees may even fight with each other over what's good and what's bad information.
Also note that the linked articles refer to a second study published simultaneously which showed no effect on honeybees next to rapeseed fields sprayed with neonicotinoids versus an altogether unsprayed field. Which is pretty remarkable, because you expect almost *any* pesticide next to your hive to have a profoundly negative effect on it.
"...but Republicans plan to come back with a new plan, where they just slash the tires on all the ambulances."
Nice try shill. Now fuck off to your pesticide sponsors. Hope you bought something nice from bee-killing money.
I think it's important to ask questions because there's been literally "dozens" of different things "definitively linked" with CCD. The public likes to seize on neonicotinoids, but they're probably one of the least supported of these many different "definitively linked" reasons. Whole countries have gone so far as to outright ban neonicotinoids, with no effect on CCD. France, for example, banned them. The next year they largely switched to blaming the condition on Asian Hornets when the decline rates didn't decrease.
The problem is that when you ban a certain pesticide, people start using others. And going from neonicotinoids to organophosphates is a massive step backwards in terms of general safety, not just to pollinators, but especially to more complex animals as well. But the biggest problem with the neonicotinoid theory is that neonicotinoids are only used in a small fraction of the areas where CCD exists. Bees can only fly several kilometers from the hive, they're not going cross-country and picking up every pesticide in every farmer's arsenal. It even exists among people who are in places where no pesticides at all are used.
It's easy for the general public to latch onto a particular cause. But once you learn more about beekeeping you realize how incredibly much out there is that can utterly f* up a hive. And which have in history regularly collapsed bee populations, far worse than the collapses we have today. Trachael mites once nearly obliterated beekeeping in Europe, saved mainly by the development of the Buckfast bee. Check out this very inexhaustive list of bee pests and diseases. There's even some really counterintuitive effects in that small levels of some pesticides can actually increase hive survival rates, in that they're deadlier to bee pests like mites than to the bees themselves.
The public also tends to totally understand colony collapse disorder in the first place. Normal winter colony death levels are about 15% in most locations (though where I am it's higher). CCD raised the US average to about 30% at its peak. This is painful and expensive to beekeepers, but it has literally no impact on the ability to sustain bee populations. A new beehive can be started with just a queen and a handful of workers. Hives can be made to produce queens en masse through proper management. Hence people can mail order starter hives, and there's never going to be a threat to the ability to produce these starter hives - a single hive can make many dozens per year. Even normal hives not managed for breeding starter hives will naturally produce several swarms every year; beekeepers try to discourage and/or catch these swarms.
In all likelihood, neonicotinoids are one among many different stressors to bees in the modern era that causes CCD. Modern bees are much more "stressed" than bees in the past. We've created an environment where new bee pests and diseases have spread far and wide to bees that never would have encountered them in the wild. We raise them on corn syrup and sugar water in the winter (good for reducing dysintery and increasing honey yields, but robbing them of certain vitamins and minerals). We transport them on flatbed trucks hundreds or thousands of kilometers (these are animals that get confused if you move their hive a couple meters; their ability to navigate by sight is poor, they're best navigating by the sun and dead reckoning). And countless varieties of poisons, even unintentional ones, affect them every day of their lives. There's so many factors now that weaken hives that any "new" factor to an area can push them over the edge.
"...but Republicans plan to come back with a new plan, where they just slash the tires on all the ambulances."
Farmers want the best yields possible. They assume that the products advertised to them are acceptable,
because being so irresponsible is easier than being responsible enough to do the research to determine whether the products are safe. But don't fool yourself; this is still irresponsible behavior. Society encourages it by taking away your farm and throwing you into the street where it's illegal for you to live if you have a bad season or two, which is just another reason we need MGI. Then people can better afford scruples.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Well, if I'm a shill, I am very poorly paid. I have noticed a lack of bees in my yard this year, too. Usually they would be all over the cherries and early bulb plants. But I have also noticed that it is cold out, except for one nice day where (surprise) the bees and wasps came out to play. The weather has since returned to "highs in the low 50s" and the bees seem to be chilling out.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Sorry for the confusion. The shill remark was directed at the OP (currently rated Troll) and how the snarky replies seemed almost a coordinated attack. I wish your garden the best!
It's easy for the general public to latch onto a particular cause. But once you learn more about beekeeping you realize how incredibly much out there is that can utterly f* up a hive. And which have in history regularly collapsed bee populations, far worse than the collapses we have today. Trachael mites once nearly obliterated beekeeping in Europe, saved mainly by the development of the Buckfast bee. Check out [wikipedia.org] this very inexhaustive list of bee pests and diseases. There's even some really counterintuitive effects in that small levels of some pesticides can actually increase hive survival rates, in that they're deadlier to bee pests like mites than to the bees themselves.
I completely agree with your point. One interesting point of speculation is that it's highly possible that Brother Adam (the developer of the Buckfast bee) was responsible for bringing Varroa to Europe. Brother Adam imported bees from around the world, and the first appearance of Varroa in the UK was not very far from where he operated.
Shill or no, his post was a very unfair criticism of the study.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
They develop pesticides that wipe out the required beneficial insects world wide, why are their executives not in chains?
Such shit like like parent's post could be done by reading several section titles on wikipedia, then adding "well, there are several factors". Not only it is cheap shit, but also misinformation - read just a bit more on the same wikipedia article to see, that some considered causes are weak suppositions, and some are strongly confirmed links. Now, either a shill or someone looking for cheap karma writes such shit here and here, and is modded up, diluting an insighful, worthy discussion.
sometimes different bees may even fight with each other over what's good and what's bad information.
Hey! Bee Slashdot!
I agree it is important to ask questions. But the questions should not be of the strawman form, or asked from a position of apparent and obvious ignorance about not only the subject, but the very study being questioned. There is no added value, and in fact negative value, to ask that kind of questions.
Trying to think laterally about the issue and find other causes for the observed behaviour is completely different from ignorantly spouting off unfounded criticism of test methodology.
Maybe in the Winter they are jonesing for a fix that they leave to find it despite it being winter, and as a result die. Due to all the bees leaving, the hive becomes unsustainable. It could also be that I think bees also provide warmth, if enough leave the rest just freeze to death.
Drug users from an external observation point of view do all sorts of crazy things to try and get their next fix, particularly when their supply or their ability to get it (money) runs out. Could be as simple as that.