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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.
CCD is likely a multifactor agent. This is the reason it's been so hard to determine. I saw a discussion with bee keepers and the collapse goes like this.
The bees are fine all summer. When they seal up the nest for the winter and begin to subsist on the remaining stored honey (from what the humans didn't take) somewhere in the middle of the winter the bees start flying off and not coming back. At some point after this has begun the queen dies and no new queen is hatched. (new queens can be hatched easily by feeding one of the larva royal jelly). It's like the bee's suddenly go insane, most fly off into the wild and die, those meant to keep the hive going stop working (such as hatching new queens) and in no time at all the hive is dead.
They are having a hard time determining cause because their is no clear cause. The insanity thing is a totally new action that's never been observed in bee populations before, outside the wasps that lay larval in other insects brains. So they are examining multiple possible paths at the same time trying to figure out what is causing this bee insanity that's causing the collapse. Neonictids are suspects because they are potent CNS actors in some species, something that could explain the insanity. But it could just as easily be that the neonictids aren't the sole cause, they could be weakening the bees such that they are starving to death in the winter, or there could be a fungus that's attacking them while they are weakened.
Once they understand better how bee's react to neonictids and perform some controlled experiments with them they will have a better idea if they are the cause or related to it. There is reasonable concern here that the risk of the neonictids isn't worth the benefit's they provide. A collapse of bee's would be catastrophic to plant life. It's not just honey bees that are dieing either, reports are bumblebee's and other species of bee are dieing off as well. There is a real concern right now that there may be whole species of bees that are gone.