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.

Comments

Re:The study was flawed

[TWX]

Thanks to Bayer and Shell, good luck finding untainted samples...

Unfortunatly...

[EmeraldBot]

People and other living beings have a habit of craving the very things that ruin them.

sort of like Antifreeze and pets/wildlife

[hguorbray]

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'

Re:sort of like Antifreeze and pets/wildlife

[hawguy]

This is why I always try to purchase the "Low Tox" antifreeze for my vehicles. Should I ever be stranded in a remote location without water, I could survive for days just by cracking the draincock on the radiator. Plus, I don't have to feel as bad about parking my car over the storm sewer and emptying out the cooling system when I do a flush!

Toss a few gallons of water in your trunk before you head to remote locations -- while the propylene glycol in the antifreeze may not kill you, the corrosion inhibitors and other ingredients plus possible oil and combustion product contamination is not going to be great for you.

So what you're saying is...

[wonkey_monkey]

So what you're saying is... *sunglassses* they get a buzz out of it?

Yeeeaaaa- no.

Re:The study was flawed

[Guy Harris]

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:

Individual foraging-age worker bumblebees or cohorts of 25 forager honeybees were housed in plastic boxes for 24 h and given access to two types of food tubes: one containing sucrose solution and one containing sucrose solution laced with a specific concentration of the[sic] IMD, TX, or CLO.

(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.

Re:The study was flawed

[hankwang]

"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...

Re:Every Creature Must Get Stoned...

[Adriax]

Those degenerate insects were born in a cell for crying out loud? What more proof do you need of their criminal nature?

Re:The study was flawed

[ShanghaiBill]

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.

One of many potential causes

[wilson_c]

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.

Re:One of many potential causes

[Marginal Coward]

Besides those things, hasn't CCD also been linked to the recent proliferation of digital image sensors?

(sorry, couldn't resist)

Re:One of many potential causes

[rahvin112]

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.

Re:The study was flawed

[Required Snark]

Your are factually incorrect. The directly linked article in Chemistry World linked to an article published in Nature entitled Bees prefer food containing neonicotinoid pesticides

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.

Ban on Neonicotinoids

[careysub]

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.

Re:The study was flawed

[Required Snark]

You are being deliberately obtuse. (That is how adults describe someone who is being willfully wrong.)

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.

Re:The study was flawed

[Rei]

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.