Scientists discover another cause of bee deaths, and it's really bad news

Scientists discover another cause of bee deaths, and it's really bad news

Jaymi Heimbuch
July 26, 2013

So what is with all the dying bees? Scientists have been trying to discover this for years. Meanwhile, bees keep dropping like... well, you know.
Is it mites? Pesticides? Cell phone towers? What is really at the root? Turns out the real issue really scary, because it is more complex and pervasive than thought.

Quartz reports:

Scientists had struggled to find the trigger for so-called Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) that has wiped out an estimated 10 million beehives, worth $2 billion, over the past six years. Suspects have included pesticides, disease-bearing parasites and poor nutrition. But in a first-of-its-kind study published today in the journal PLOS ONE, scientists at the University of Maryland and the US Department of Agriculture have identified a witch’s brew of pesticides and fungicides contaminating pollen that bees collect to feed their hives. The findings break new ground on why large numbers of bees are dying though they do not identify the specific cause of CCD, where an entire beehive dies at once.

The researchers behind that study in PLOS ONE -- Jeffery S. Pettis, Elinor M. Lichtenberg, Michael Andree, Jennie Stitzinger, Robyn Rose, Dennis vanEngelsdorp -- collected pollen from hives on the east coast, including cranberry and watermelon crops, and fed it to healthy bees. Those bees had a serious decline in their ability to resist a parasite that causes Colony Collapse Disorder. The pollen they were fed had an average of nine different pesticides and fungicides, though one sample of pollen contained a deadly brew of 21 different chemicals. Further, the researchers discovered that bees that ate pollen with fungicides were three times more likely to be infected by the parasite.
The discovery means that fungicides, thought harmless to bees, is actually a significant part of Colony Collapse Disorder. And that likely means farmers need a whole new set of regulations about how to use fungicides. While neonicotinoids have been linked to mass bee deaths -- the same type of chemical at the heart of the massive bumble bee die off in Oregon -- this study opens up an entirely new finding that it is more than one group of pesticides, but a combination of many chemicals, which makes the problem far more complex.
And it is not just the types of chemicals used that need to be considered, but also spraying practices. The bees sampled by the authors foraged not from crops, but almost exclusively from weeds and wildflowers, which means bees are more widely exposed to pesticides than thought.
The authors write, "[M]ore attention must be paid to how honey bees are exposed to pesticides outside of the field in which they are placed. We detected 35 different pesticides in the sampled pollen, and found high fungicide loads. The insecticides esfenvalerate and phosmet were at a concentration higher than their median lethal dose in at least one pollen sample. While fungicides are typically seen as fairly safe for honey bees, we found an increased probability of Nosema infection in bees that consumed pollen with a higher fungicide load. Our results highlight a need for research on sub-lethal effects of fungicides and other chemicals that bees placed in an agricultural setting are exposed to."
While the overarching issue is simple -- chemicals used on crops kill bees -- the details of the problem are increasingly more complex, including what can be sprayed, where, how, and when to minimize the negative effects on bees and other pollinators while still assisting in crop production. Right now, scientists are still working on discovering the degree to which bees are affected and by what. It will still likely be a long time before solutions are uncovered and put into place. When economics come into play, an outright halt in spraying anything at all anywhere is simply impossible.
Quartz notes, "Bee populations are so low in the US that it now takes 60% of the country’s surviving colonies just to pollinate one California crop, almonds. And that’s not just a west coast problem—California supplies 80% of the world’s almonds, a market worth $4 billion."

http://www.treehugger.com/natural-sciences/scientists-discover-another-cause-bee-deaths-and-its-really-bad-news.html

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Pesticide makes bees forget the scent for food, new study finds

Pesticide makes bees forget the scent for food, new study finds
Neonicotinoids block part of brain bees use for learning, leaving them unable to make link between floral scents and nectar


Damian Carrington   
The Guardian, Wednesday 27 March 2013

Widely used pesticides have been found in new research to block a part of the brain that bees use for learning, rendering some of them unable to perform the essential task of associating scents with food. Bees exposed to two kinds of pesticide were slower to learn or completely forgot links between floral scents and nectar.
These effects could make it harder for bees to forage among flowers for food, thereby threatening their survival and reducing the pollination of crops and wild plants.
The findings add to existing research that neonicotinoid pesticides are contributing to the decline in bee populations.
It has also been revealed that a separate government field study on the impact of the pesticides on bees was seriously compromised by contamination because the chemicals are so widespread in the environment.
The government put the field study at the heart of the UK's resistance to a Europe-wide ban on the controversial pesticides earlier this month. The UK was one of nine out of 27 member states that opposed suspending some uses of the insecticides across the EU, after environment secretary Owen Paterson said, "I have asked the EC to wait for the results of our field trials, rather than rushing to a decision". On Wednesday, his department said more field research was needed.
The new findings on the effect of pesticides on bee brains showed that within 20 minutes of exposure to neonicotinoids the neurons in the major learning centre of the brain stopped firing. Christopher Connolly at the University of Dundee, who led the peer-reviewed work published in the online journal Nature Communications, said it was the first to show the pesticides had a direct impact on pollinator brain physiology.
A parallel peer-reviewed study on the behaviour of bees subjected to the same insecticides found the bees were slower to learn or completely forgot important associations between floral scent and food rewards. "Disruption in this important function has profound implications for honeybee colony survival, because bees that cannot learn will not be able to find food," said Dr Geraldine Wright, at Newcastle University, who led the work.
The scientists who carried out the separate field study for the Department for Environment Food and Rural Affairs admitted it was "not a statistically robust study" because of the contamination issues. The trial results (pdf), which have not been peer-reviewed, showed that 20 hives of bumblebees meant to act as pesticide-free controls in the experiments were significantly contaminated owing to the widespread presence of the chemicals in the environment. Neonicotinoids are near ubiquitous in modern agriculture and earn billions a year for their manufacturers. But a series of high-profile scientific studies in the last year has increasingly linked them to harmful effects in bees. Declines in bees and other pollinators, which fertilise three-quarters of the world's food crops, have been linked to habitat loss and disease as well as pesticides.
Julian Little of Bayer, which makes one of the neonicotinoids tested in the government study, said: "We welcome field studies and once again, when such studies are carried out, there does not appear to be a link between neonicotinoid seed treatment use and poor bee health."
But Professor David Goulson, at the University of Stirling, and whose study in the peer-reviewed journal Science showed an 85% loss in queens produced, said: "This study had no controls and all we can really learn from it is that bumblebee nests placed on farmland, even on farms currently using no neonicotinoids, are likely to be exposed to a cocktail of these chemicals. Ministers should certainly not be basing any decisions on this." He added that while UK ministers and industry criticised studies in which the pesticide doses were controlled, the failure of the field study showed the benefits of that approach.
Alongside the study, the government published its own assessment of a review in January by the European Food Safety Authority, which labelled three neonicotinoids an unacceptable danger to bees that feed on flowering crops, and was the basis of the proposed EC ban.
Defra's chief scientist Ian Boyd said: "Decisions on the use of neonicotinoids must be based on sound scientific evidence. Our assessment demonstrates that while we cannot rule out the possibility of neonicotinoids affecting pollinators we cannot be clear as to the extent of their impact. I therefore support the conclusions that further data based on more realistic field trials is required."
Sandra Bell of Friends of the Earth said: "Bee health is far too urgent to wait until more research has been completed – restrictions should be placed on these pesticides until bee safety can be assured." There have been previous suspensions in France, Italy, Germany and Slovenia.
• This article was amended on 28 March 2013. The subheading on the original misspelled neonicotinoids as neocotinoids.

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/mar/27/pesticide-bees-scent-food-neocotinoid
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EPA Slapped With Lawsuit Over Ongoing Bee Deaths

EPA Slapped With Lawsuit Over Ongoing Bee Deaths
By
Fractured Paradigm
– March 22, 2013

http://fracturedparadigm.com/2013/03/22/epa-slapped-with-lawsuit-over-ongoing-bee-deaths/

A group of beekeepers and environmentalists announced today that they are suing the Environmental Protection Agency in an effort to curb the use of insecticides they say are decimating bee populations and putting our nation’s food supply in jeopardy.
The four beekeepers and five environmental and consumer groups involved in the lawsuit, including the Pesticide Action Network, Center for Food Safety and Beyond Pesticides, say the link between neonicotinoids—a nicotine-like class of pesticides that include clothianidin and thiamethoxam—and bee die offs is crystal clear. And they claim the EPA acted outside the law when it allowed for “conditional registration” of their use. Syngenta and Bayer Crop Science are the primary manufacturers of clothianidin and thiamethoxam.
“We are taking the EPA to court for its failure to protect bees from pesticides,” Paul Towers, spokesperson for the Pesticide Action Network, tells TakePart. “Despite our best efforts to warn the agency about the problems posed by neonicotinoids, the EPA continued to ignore the clear warning signs of an ag system in trouble.”
Towers says the bee shortage for this year’s California almond crop, a story we told you about a few weeks ago, was proof enough that the EPA needs to act now, and must reconsider this class of pesticides.
Unlike older classes of pesticides, says Towers, neonicotinoids are applied before planting to coat seeds. The pesticide is then taken up through the vascular system of the plant and expressed through the pollen and nectar, which bees rely on for food. Their introduction onto farms in the mid-2000s, also coincides with more widespread bee colony collapses than had been seen before.
“These are persistent pesticides,” he says. “They remain in the soil and persist into the next generation of plants.”
This isn’t just a California problem. The finger pointing has been active across the country, including Ohio, where bees are needed to pollinate more than 70 crops, including apples, pumpkins and berries. Bee die offs there were rampant last spring. (Bayer, by the way, sponsored seminars for beekeepers in Ohio—a move that stung critics. Doh!) And the story is repeated from Illinois to the Carolinas. The Europeans are alarmed at bee population crashes as well, and tried to limit a trio of pesticides, but failed.
On Tuesday, the American Bird Conservancy (ABC) called for a ban on their use, because, they say, the pesticides have moved up the food chain and are now impacting song birds.
“A single corn kernel coated with a neonicotinoid can kill a songbird,” said Cynthia Palmer, pesticides program manager for ABC, one of the nation’s leading bird conservation organizations. “Even a tiny grain of wheat or canola treated with the oldest neonicotinoid—called imidacloprid—can fatally poison a bird. And as little as 1/10th of a neonicotinoid-coated corn seed per day during egg-laying season is all that is needed to affect reproduction.”
University of California-Davis apiculturist Eric Mussen tells TakePart that the disappearance of bees is extraordinarily complicated. Pesticides, nutrition, disease and mites can all play a role in colony collapse disorder, and that scientists simply don’t know what’s causing bees to vanish at a 30 percent rate.
“It’s a combination of all these things. I certainly wouldn’t let the neonicotinoids off the hook. They are negatively impacting honeybees and other insects that we don’t know anything about, but if the neonicotinoids were yanked from the market, I don’t anticipate seeing a rapid return to the ‘good old days’ of pre-mite 5-10 percent losses,” he says.
When you go into thriving hives versus collapsed hives, the chemical soup scientists measure is still the same, says Mussen.
“But there is something different between the two. We still haven’t determined what that is.”

Original article by Clare Leschin-Hoar on TakePart