Bee news

In a match that some would say was made in hell, the nation's two leading producers of agro-chemicals have joined forces in a partnership to reintroduce the use of the herbicide 2, 4-D, one half of the infamous defoliant Agent Orange, which was used by American forces to clear jungle during the Vietnam War. These two biotech giants have developed a weed management program that, if successful, would go a long way toward a predicted doubling of harmful herbicide use in America's corn belt during the next decade.

Honeybee Democracy: How Beehives Reﬂect Our Brains — and Politics

The brain is a beehive, buzzing and bustling inside with the ebb and flow of information. Whether it be through neurons or bees, both brains and beehives must make decisions; both must decide in order to survive. A new study by Prof. Tom Seeley, neurobiology and behavior, published in last month's issue of Science, proposes a novel "bee as neuron" metaphor. It revealed that the way swarms of bees reach consensus is extraordinarily similar to the way people do.

Bee hive hums recorded to monitor insects' health

Monitoring devices are being put in bee hives across Scotland as part of a project to keep an eye on their health.
The monitors record temperature and use a microphone to record the hum the bees make while working and resting.
Already the project has started to show the many different hums bees use to co-ordinate their work.
The project is also helping to work out which environmental forces and factors are behind the decline in bees and other pollinators.

There was quite a stir among beekeepers and anti-GMO activists last fall when chemical and seed giant Monsanto purchased Beeologics, a small company best known for its "groundbreaking research" applying RNAi technology to honeybees, a process that blocks gene expression. This was Monsanto's first acquisition of a pest control biotech company.
Since its inception in 2007, Beeologics has been developing Remebee®, an anti-viral treatment for use in honeybees affected with Israeli Acute Paralysis Virus (IAPV), a bee-specific virus which originated from Australia and was found and named in Israel in 2002.

Compelling new evidence from the US government's top bee expert that modern pesticides may be a major cause of collapsing bee populations led to calls yesterday for the chemicals to be banned.
A study published in the current issue of the German science journal Naturwissenschaften, reveals how bees given minute doses of the widely used pesticide imidacloprid became more vulnerable to infections from a deadly parasite, nosema.

Call to ban pesticides linked to bee deaths

The House of Commons is to debate the impact on bees and other insects of the new generation of pesticides that has been linked to bee mortality in several countries.
The Government will be called on to suspend all neonicotinoid pesticides approved in Britain, pending more exhaustive tests of their long-term effects on bees and other invertebrates. The subject will be raised in an adjournment debate in the Commons next Tuesday on a motion tabled by Martin Caton, the Labour MP for Gower.

EPA Needs to Cancel Bee-Killing Pesticide- Clothianidin

The Sierra Club has called on the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to immediately suspend the registration of the insecticide clothianidin, based on new scientific evidence of extensive contamination in bees and soil.
In January this year scientists at Purdue University documented major adverse impacts from clothianidin, used as a seed treatment in corn, on honey bee health. The results showed clothianidin present in foraging areas long after treated seed has been planted.

Walk into the garden section of any Home Depot, and you're likely to find a product called Bayer 2-1 Systemic Rose and Flower Care, which offers broad-spectrum pest control (i.e., it kills a wide range of insects) and synthetic fertilizer in one convenient product. Take a close look at the label, and you'll find that its one active pesticide ingredient is imidacloprid, a neonicotinoid. "Apply granules to soil around base of plant, sprinkling evenly in the area under branches," the instructions state. How does the product work? Bayer provides a helpful explanation right on the label:
This product is absorbed by roots and moves through the entire plant. Even new growth is fed and protected against insects for up to 8 weeks. Rain or watering cannot wash off this internal protection!

Frightening new research shows honey bees are being exposed to deadly neonicotinoid insecticides and several other agricultural pesticides throughout their foraging period. The research, published in the Scientific Journal 'PLoS One' says extremely high levels of clothianidin and thiamethoxam were found in planter exhaust material produced during the planting of treated maize seed. The work, which could raise new questions about the long-term survival of the honey bee, was conducted by Christian H. Krupke of the Department of Entomology at Purdue University, Brian D. Eitzer of the Department of Analytical Chemistry at the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station and Krispn Given of Purdue.

Parasitic fly spotted in honeybees, causes workers to abandon colonies

Throughout North America, honeybees are abandoning their hives. The workers are often found dead, some distance away. Meanwhile, the hives are like honeycombed Mary Roses, with honey and pollen left uneaten, and larvae still trapped in their chambers.
You can read the full text from 'PlusOne' here

ECVC demands that Monsanto compensate beekeepers

Following the decision of the European Court of Justice, pollen and honey containing pollen from MON 810 maize is not marketable for human consumption. In fact, Monsanto has "forgotten" to apply for approval for its use.
ECVC demands that Monsanto takes responsibility for it's products and compensates beekeepers for all the damages they have suffered : the value of lost crops, the loss of markets and the costs of analysis.

The saying "you are what you eat" applies to bees too. The type of nectar they consume to create honey has a lasting chemical effect on the resulting sweet stuff. And, if the bees employ nectar from the toxic Rhododendron flower, guess what? You get toxic, "Mad Honey.

A new study of different types of bees—bumble bees, honey bees, stingless bees, and solitary bees—offers a first look at the genetic underpinnings of their different lifestyles.
Most people have trouble telling them apart, but these different bee species have home lives that are as different from one another as a monarch's palace is from a hippie commune or a hermit's cabin in the woods.

When Tien Luu joined Mandyam Srinivasan's lab at the University of Queensland to study how honeybees navigate, she soon came up against a fundamental problem—how to observe bees while they're flying. "It's very hard to hold a camera chasing them!" she says. So she got together with some roboticists and programmers and built a simple virtual reality system: a bee flight simulator.

Activists, farmers and scores of others rejoiced as the seven-member jury of the Permanent People's Tribunal (PPT) delivered its verdict after three days of deliberations.
The Tribunal, the first such to be held in India, called for more responsibility on part of six agrochemical transnational corporations.
Pesticides manufactured by Germany-based Bayer are banned in the country, but continue to be used in other parts of Europe. The population of bees has declined by 40% to 60% across the world owing to the use of these neonicotinoid pesticides.
See the full coverage of the PPT Session here

Researchers at the Norwegian University of Life Sciences and the University of Bergen have studied the molecular structure of vitellogenin and made new discoveries.

Why are bee colonies worldwide suffering mysterious deaths? A unique study describes a single bee protein that can promote bee health and solve a major economic challenge.
"Detailed studies on the molecules that keep bees healthy are extremely important to the food industry as well as the global provision of food,"
One of these molecules is a protein called vitellogenin. "Simply put, the more vitellogenin in bees, the longer they live. Vitellogenin also guides bees to do different social tasks, such caregiving or foraging. It also supports the immune function and is an antioxidant that promotes stress resistance

The worrisome deaths of bee populations worldwide is likely to continue as the German agrochemical company Bayer remains unrestricted in its manufacture and sale of neonicotinoid pesticides.
Bayer's accountability in the phenomenon known as the Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) is among the cases to be heard at the Permanent People's Tribunal (PPT) Session on Agrochemical Transnational Corporations (TNCs), a landmark international opinion tribunal that will try the six largest agrochemical TNCs for various human rights violations, to be held from December 3 to 6, 2011.

Big pharma should combat bee decline, MEPs say

BRUSSELS - The European Parliament has called on the pharmaceutical industry to play a role in finding a solution to halt the rapid decline of the honey bee.
There are "more than a dozen factors, ranging from declines in flowering plants and the use of memory-damaging insecticides to the world-wide spread of pests and air pollution," said a recent report by the UN Environment Programme.
It noted that "increasing use of chemicals in agriculture, including 'systemic insecticides' and those used to coat seeds, is being found to be damaging or toxic to bees."

Behind Mass Die-Offs, Pesticides Lurk as Culprit

In the past dozen years, three new diseases have decimated populations of amphibians, honeybees, and — most recently — bats. Increasingly, scientists suspect that low-level exposure to pesticides could be contributing to this rash of epidemics.
Please also read: Immune Deficiency Disease in Wildlife: a hypothesis

More than three-fourths of the honey sold in U.S. grocery stores isn't exactly what the bees produce, according to testing done exclusively for Food Safety News.
The results show that the pollen frequently has been filtered out of products labeled "honey."
The removal of these microscopic particles from deep within a flower would make the nectar flunk the quality standards set by most of the world's food safety agencies.
The food safety divisions of the World Health Organization, the European Commission and dozens of others also have ruled that without pollen there is no way to determine whether the honey came from legitimate and safe sources.
In the U.S., the Food and Drug Administration says that any product that's been ultra-filtered and no longer contains pollen isn't honey. However, the FDA isn't checking honey sold here to see if it contains pollen.

Dr Mason has collated all of the available scientific evidence that neonicotinoids are responsible for the mass-deaths of bees, bumblebees, butterflies and other forms of wildlife around the world - wherever they are used.
She has analysed the way in which the multinational pesticide companies have subverted and largely taken control of the supposed 'regulatory process' in American, Britain and Europe.
She has analysed the manner in which the same companies have side-stepped the legal testing procedures, have applied older risk assessment tests which cannot assess the toxicity of these revolutionary pesticides - and have licensed these hyper-toxic crop treatments on a global scale, without every complying with proper life-cycle studies or long term chronic exposure studies.
She analyses how the so-called 'pesticide watchdogs' on both sides of the Atlantic have either been: blind, deaf and toothless, or have actually become co-opted as business protection departments for the pesticides industry.

Combinations of toxins may cause adverse additive or synergistic effects that would be difficult to detect through surveys of beekeepers or analysis of their apiaries without dedicated multifactorial analysis. It has been shown, for example, that the toxicity to bees of some pyrethroid and neonicotinoid insecticides increases significantly when combined with certain fungicides.
Similarly, Johnson et al. found that coumaphos and τ-fluvalinate each synergize the other's toxicity to honey bees, perhaps through competitive inhibition of the metabolic enzymes that detoxify those pesticides.

The Honey Bee Advisory Board is in Washington D. C. this week, meeting with, among others, representatives of the EPA and Bayer CropScience. During the discussions it became apparent that Bayer was voluntarily removing almond trees from the label of their imidacloprid products.
Our call this morning was to inform us, and now you, that EPA is reviewing this request. Yes, reviewing. It seems that crops are so seldom removed from a label, especially by voluntary request, that the internal engine at EPA isn't quite sure how to make that happen. So they are reviewing it.

Three related events have recently heightened the honeybee issue:
1. Prosecutors in Italy have charged Bayer CropScience and Syngenta - both manufacturers of clothianidin - in honeybee deaths
2. Bee Culture Magazine has published a letter from Dr. Rosemary Mason, an independent researcher in the UK and bumblebee expert, that has raised serious questions about USEPA credibility in allowing systemic pesticides to be registered when these products clearly received insufficient testing.
3. The SETAC Pellston conference report, from the 2011 conference on systemic pesticides' risks, in my view, mocks the hard work of scientists around the world.

It is hard to overestimate the importance of bees in the food chain. Almonds, carrots, melons, apricots, cherries, pears, apples, prunes, plums, cantaloupe, onions, avocados, kiwi, blueberries, cranberries and many more fruits and vegetables depend on honeybee pollination.
And while bees struggle against many obstacles to survive — environmental pollution, climate change, infections, and poor diet from low-protein monoculture crops — the role of pesticides, particularly systemic pesticides, has been initially played down.

French beekeepers hold mass demonstrations against the pesticide Cruiser

Despite the withdrawal of the license for Syngenta’s pesticide ‘Cruiser’, by the French Council of State, for use as a seed treatment on maize in 2008, 2009 and 2010, the Ministry of Agriculture not only continued to allow use of this product, but in June 2011 it authorized the use of Syngenta ‘Cruiser OSR’ for oilseed rape/canola.
"Cruiser" contains the active substance 'thiamethoxam", a neonicotinoid insecticide that is deadly for bees. Permitting the use of thiamethoxam as a seed-dressing for oilseed rape/ canola - on flowers visited by bees, butterflies and bumblebees, poses a grave threat to the future of all bee-colonies in France.

I would like to draw the attention of your readers to this US SETAC website Workshop Summary. On 15th September the Executive Summary of the Pesticide Risk Assessment for Pollinators from the 5-day SETAC Pellston Workshop in Florida, held in January 2011, was published. The 45-page document confirms what many of us had already suspected. The pesticide companies have total control over testing and registration of their own products.

2 New Bee Species Are Mysterious Pieces in the Panama Puzzle

Smithsonian scientists have discovered two new, closely related bee species: one from Coiba Island in Panama and another from northern Colombia. Both descended from of a group of stingless bees that originated in the Amazon and moved into Central America, the ancestors of Mayan honeybees. The presence of one of these new species on Coiba and Rancheria Islands, and its absence from the nearby mainland, is a mystery that will ultimately shed light on Panama's history and abundant biodiversity.

The Occupy Wall Street crowd protesting the way things are now may be benefitting from the way things were in Vermont a century ago, when a Barre physician began prescribing a cure for what ails us.
Coughs, sniffles and flu-like symptoms have become routine occupation hazards as the weather grows colder, especially for those sleeping on the ground outside. The honey-vinegar infusion is considered a preventive measure as well as a restorative for the already sick.

Agriculture committee calls for EU-wide action to save bees

Rising bee mortality could devastate EU food production and environmental stability, Agriculture Committee MEPs warned on Thursday. An estimated 84% of plant species and 76% of food production in Europe depend on pollination by bees. To protect them, the committee urged the Commission and Member states to take coordinated action, including stepping up investment in research and increasing funding for apiculture programmes after 2013.

Commission in a 'sticky situation' over GM honey

Thrown into disarray by the unexpected court judgement, the commission's next step is unclear. According to Commissioner for Health and Consumer Policy John Dalli is considering providing "fast track retrospective authorisation" for MON 810 for use in honey - in the hope that the problem and the issue of compensating the European beekeeping industry for mass contamination of their product, will go away. This is moral hazard on a gigantic scale. The commission would be sending out a strong message - not just to the biotech industry, but to all multinational corporations: obeying the law is for little people only. If you break the law by contaminating conventional crops, not only will you not be punished - through a lack of polluter pays liability laws - but you will in fact be rewarded through the authorisation of your GM variety for a new purpose without having to go through the standard authorisation procedure.

October 15, 2011: Day of International Demonstrations to save the bees from Neonicotinoid Pesticides

After denouncing the evils of the Neonicotinoid Pesticide 'Cruiser' at the world Bee-Congress 'Apimondia'.
French beekeepers will take to the streets, parading in their bee-suits with banners and bee-smokers, on October 15, 2011. Beekeepers say they are confronting years of ignorance and inaction on the part of the French government, which has failed to deal with the destruction of half of all French bee-colonies, killed by neonicotinoid insecticides in recent years.