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Three-Quarters of All Honey On Earth Has Pesticides In It (theverge.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: About three quarters of all honey worldwide is contaminated with pesticides known to harm bees, according to a new study. Though the pesticide levels were below the limit deemed safe for human consumption, there was still enough insecticide in there to harm pollinators. The finding suggests that, as one of the study authors said, "there's almost no safe place for a bee to exist." Scientists analyzed 198 honey samples from all continents, except Antarctica, for five types of pesticides called neonicotinoids, which are known to harm bees. They found at least one of the five compounds in most samples, with the highest contamination in North America, Asia, and Europe. The results are published today in the journal Science.
To get a better sense of just how widespread neonic contamination is, Mitchell and his colleagues analyzed 198 worldwide honey samples collected as a citizen science project between 2012 and 2016. They found that 75 percent of honey contained at least one of the five tested neonics, and 45 percent of samples had two or more. Honey from North America, Asia, and Europe was most contaminated, while the lowest contamination was in South America. Neonic concentrations were relatively low: on average, 1.8 nanograms per gram in contaminated honey -- below the limits set as safe for people by the EU.
To get a better sense of just how widespread neonic contamination is, Mitchell and his colleagues analyzed 198 worldwide honey samples collected as a citizen science project between 2012 and 2016. They found that 75 percent of honey contained at least one of the five tested neonics, and 45 percent of samples had two or more. Honey from North America, Asia, and Europe was most contaminated, while the lowest contamination was in South America. Neonic concentrations were relatively low: on average, 1.8 nanograms per gram in contaminated honey -- below the limits set as safe for people by the EU.
Not so much below the limit that is safe for the bees, hmm?
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Do not let the greedy fools kill us all.
you choose to measure
Do you have an alternative plan to protect bees from pests?
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
Dosage matters, unless you are a nutcase like Alex Jones who thinks one atom of aluminum (the most abundant metal on the Earthâ(TM)s surface) will instantly guaranteed give you autism. Itâ(TM)s better to have pesticides and cheaper more plentiful food than famines and global catastrophic starvation and possible extinction via war.
Hi, I'm not often posting but I have an anecdote. About three years ago I bought a house. First two years, no honeybees. This year we had them. Wowsa, great!! When I was young (40 yrs ago) honeybees were all around but haven't seen them for 20+ years.
Can I say what is different? Not sure. We are completely organic, but use horticultural oil for hemlock woolly adelgids & hemlock scale, not currently using but did/might future use spinosad for winter moth and gypsy moth. The exotic (asian, european) insects are very aggressive on native (north american) trees. Often defoliation is complete, no leaves left uneaten. It is hard to judge whether mild pesticides (horticultural oil, spinosad) to save the trees are better or worse than refraint for their (small, but non-zero) effect on honeybees.
Neonicotinoids seem to be a problem and restricting those has a high level of support. Let's start with removing those, and see where we go.
I hear pesticides are rich in antioxidants.
You are welcome on my lawn.
What about the Martian honey? Tim S.
It's making the frogs sweet.
no, really we are totally fucked but you should already know it and I'm only typing this in order to not be bothered with some weird-ass word count threshold. Whatever, we are fucked
Monsanto censors this topic heavily.
I could use a little help on extracting it.
We have the ability to detect materials in such minute amounts that we can find traces of almost anything, anywhere. It is definitely an effective way to generate headlines. But is it meaningful in any real sense? There is some botulinum toxin in the air you breathe. The question is always how much.
Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
Given the history of big corporations influencing dosage levels, we do not have to be a conspiracy nutcase (or somewhat fake nutcase) like Alex Jones to realistically assume powerful forces are going to be trying their best to corrupt the whole subject.
Then we have the history of science moving slowly due to funding etc, as well as being wrong for a while on top of the propaganda and corruption making it move slower. Remember when Pb was not a problem? Then we had various levels of acceptable Pb under different situations and finally after a REALLY LONG TIME the conclusion that there really is NO safe acceptable level Pb under most situations.
The stuff hasn't been around long enough to see long term problems and even so, if the problems can be kept close to the margins of error and if symptoms between people differ even slightly you divide the population so that the largest groups fall too close to error margins. I wouldn't put it past Monsanto to add something to make it WORSE to diversify symptoms... someday they WILL do something like this. because profits... duh.
Even old accepted standard tests such as the amount of Vitamin C we should have just have not been revised with better studies involving more than 1 man getting scurvy... plus there is the whole matter of what is a healthy amount vs what threshold is so bad symptoms develop. In this case, it could be the healthy amount is 3x as high as the minimum mean average.... why use a mean average?
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Even the bees have gone industrial.
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
I, for one, am feeling a bit guilty. Early in my career I designed instruments (the technical sort, not the musical sort) and I saw how the supposedly well-educated with science degrees (as opposed to my engineering degree) completely misunderstood the instruments and the data, and frequently mixed data from dissimilar instruments that lacked a common calibration (do THAT and you ought to know you have an invalid result and probably have comitted a scientific fraud).
The new gadgets scientists have are allowing them to detect and measure ever-smaller quantities of things, and then freak-out the average "soccer mom" with frightful headlines which are completely devoid of context or proper explanation. Instead of panicking over the detection of pesticides in honey, we should be making a point of how litte is there and how hard it ise to even detect it. Just how does the quantity of pesticides in honey today compare to the amount present a ceturty ago? How does it compare to the quantity of lead or aresenic or any radioactive element etc one might have found in honey two centuries ago IF modern instruments had existed back then? Is the amount detected now actually harmful, or are there another slew of junk science causation/correlation falacy papers out there tarnishing those particular pesticides and cloudng judgement about what levels are unlikely to be harmful to a typical human with a typical lifespan, with THOSE papers being used to make this one seem scary?
It's become increasingly clear to me that we needed to come up with a better scientist before we handed over better tools.
Fools with high-powered tools are only more-empowered fools.
... with nuclear waste.
Since the spate of nuclear tests in the 60s, carbon-14 levels still haven't dropped to baseline.
There's also a market in pre-nuclear age steel for use in applications where sensitive equipment would be affected by the cobalt-60 that contaminates our entire steel industry because it uses the air that we soiled with nuclear explosions.
However, we've not all mutated into comic-book superheroes or Cronenberg monsters.
Stuff gets contaminated with stuff. It's generally only a problem for biological lifeforms when natural processes concentrate that stuff and it's toxic to them.
honey samples collected as a citizen science project between 2012 and 2016. They found that 75 percent of honey contained at least one of the five tested neonics,
But unless those samples were from evenly distributed sources, across the world, all they tell us is that the places which returned the largest numbers of samples had the most pesticides.
That does not lead to the conclusion that three-quarters of all the honey (from everywhere) is the same as that sampled.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
So what? 100% of all money has measurable amounts of cocaine on it.
Just because we've gotten really good at measuring tiny quantities of things, doesn't mean the presence of those things has become a larger problem.
The average 5 year old probably has measurable levels of pesticides in her hair. After all, every moronic suburbanite from Bakersfield to Boston sprays them like water in search of a prettier lawn than their neighbor's.
It's about moms and their precious little angels being fed !OMG! pesticides by the evil something or other.
That's why the titles for this "news" are all "HONEY IS FULL OF PESTICIDES! SOME OF IT WITH MORE THAN ONE!!! PANIC!!! HORROR!!!" instead of "Amount of nicotine-like compounds found in honey far below levels found in a single puff of tobacco smoke".
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
"About three quarters of all honey worldwide is contaminated with pesticides known to harm bees"
Of course, one might also point out that at least half, if not more, of earth's population has food and is alive ALSO because of pesticides, generally.
-Styopa
Pesticide resistance happens naturally, how about we help bees become resistant to pesticides by GMO-ing them? (And do this multiple times in multiple ways with diverse bee genotypes, so that we aren't producing a bee monoculture.)
Or at least breeding them for that? Rapidly develop pesticide resistant honeybees? And while we are at it, why not help them become resistant to mites/viruses?
I *like* eating. We need bees, why not help them out?
--PeterM
So, if pesticides are killing them, why are they making a comeback...
https://www.washingtonpost.com...
https://www.globalcitizen.org/...
Just another day in Paradise
So does most coffee...tested the air over a hot cup with a GCMS myself.
It was nice to show WHERE the concentrations are. How about showing what Honey companies have the highest concentrations.
Maybe if they get hit in the pocket book, there would be some movement.
Why is it the pest insects are always the ones to develop resistance to pesticides? Why can't the good bugs develop pesticide resistance for once?
Yes, what about unintended consequences.
Possibly, by simply taking a breath and letting it out, you MAY BE setting in chain a set of events that leads to a typhoon hitting Taiwan with massive loss of life. Weather is a chaotic system and this could truly happen.
So literally every breath you take could have dire unintended consequences. But you're powerless to foresee such so you don't worry about it, you can't possibly calculate the risks.
Similarly, I don't think giving bees resistance to neonics is going to turn them into human-deadly zombie plague producing killer insects that will wipe out all life on the planet. Might something bad happen? Yup. Should we forego this, and fail to produce resistant bees and let bees continue their downward spiral toward practical extinction as crop pollinators? No thanks. Breeding pesticide resistant bees seems less of a risk to me than decline of food production.
I need my nic fix, man! And the old lady won't let me have ciggies anymore!
True "organic" (meaning without pesticides or other similar chemicals) honey is a very rare beast. There's basically nowhere on the continental US that can truly be declared organic. Bees can travel such distances (and so can herbicides and pesticides) that an entirely organic foraging area for honeybees is very hard to find. Even if, for example, you have multiple acres of prime foraging area, all if takes is a neighbor spraying glyphosphate, or neonic seeds to have spread, etc.
Since bees will not cross wide expanses of water, islands can be an isolated foraging area. Quite of a bit of honey designated organic comes from Hawaii, for instance.
Obviously a sinister motive behind hiding this other relevant data. -Mike
I was not specific - I said under most situations. I was NOT specifically referring to water. Actually, I was thinking paint and then gasoline both which took way too long to catch up with expert opinion (which should be enough when health and safety are involved... except profit $$$ so then it has to be 100% scientific consensus...)
As far as water, a quick google will show recently REVISED lower levels of Pb not that long ago...(CDC) which supports MY point - the thresholds keep changing and usually they go down. Furthermore, a single government's policy is not the best source for a factual basis on a question of science/reality.
Infrastructure costs influence policy making. duh...
The BEST threshold (zero risk ideal) vs the HEALTHY threshold (negligible risk) vs SAFE threshold (politically acceptable risk... unlike the other two it is a subjective value.) Thresholds are involved at multiple levels and influenced by many factors at each level from policy to science to data collection.
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Stop turning off your brain whenever conspiracy comes up!
If you have any significant social experience and reasonable intelligence you've noticed conspiracies or participated in them!
A little bit of watching reality tv shows: groups of people plotting against each other for some advantage. That IS conspiracy; I've seen so little TV I suspect it must be a big feature of TV given my small sample size. No tinfoil hats are required. Hey, lets tell our parents we are doing X when we are actually doing Y! = conspiracy.
MOST of what the FBI does is criminal conspiracy investigation! (my source? my FBI recruiter.) Great journalists are made (and get awards for) investigating and exposing conspiracies. Just look at any list of journalism award winners-- I bet you most are conspiracy investigations.
Yes there are stupid conspiracies and reasoning from unknowns yields poor success rates. Profile a criminal type and you operate the unknown using stereotyped behavior patterns... individuals or groups (conspiracies require >=2)
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My theory: bees will evolve and thrive. It may not happen in 5 years or 10, but we will start seeing bees resistant to this shit.
Creationist theory: Bees were made perfect by God. They won't change and will die out.
"If you eat, you are part of Agriculture"