Sections
-
Recent Posts
- The United States’ extensive knowledge of the 1976 planned military coup in Argentina
- Comply or die: The only truly compliant person in a police state is a dead one
- ‘If you want to save the USPS,’ says watchdog, ‘fire Louis DeJoy’
- A Palestinian prayer for Ramadan: May the voices of the oppressed be heard
- How “representative” is US democracy?
To bee or not to bee
Posted on January 31, 2014 by Jerry Mazza
A friend of mine from advertising, Richard Tucker, now working as a freelance producer, sent me a funny email the other morning with a huge bee on it. The headline reads “If I Die You Die,” which in advertising generally means, “Duck, a blood bath is coming;” or perhaps it’s a metaphor for the world of people. Richard is a very clever fellow.
But bee experts have written before, quite reasonably, that the mysterious mass die-off of honey bees that pollinate $30 billion worth of crops in the US has so decimated America’s apis mellifera population that one bad winter could leave fields fallow.
Now, a new study has pinpointed some of the probable causes of bee deaths and the rather scary results show that averting beemageddon will be far more difficult than previously thought. The busy little buzzers play a great part in the production of our foods. And I’ve always been amazed by them. I thought it was time to dive in and find out the truth.
Scientists have struggled hard to find the trigger for what’s called the 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. Let’s get the buzz on this one . . .
When researchers collected pollen from hives on the east coast pollinating cranberry, watermelon and other crops and fed it to healthy bees, those bees showed a significant decline in their ability to resist infection by a parasite called Nosema ceranae. The parasite has been implicated in Colony Collapse Disorder though scientists took pains to point out that their findings do not directly link the pesticides to CCD. The pollen was contaminated on average with nine different pesticides and fungicides though scientists discovered 21 agricultural chemicals in one sample. Scientists identified eight ag chemicals associated with increased risk of infection by parasite.
Most disturbing, bees that ate pollen contaminated with fungicides were three times as likely to be infected by the parasite. Widely used, fungicides had been thought to be harmless for bees because they’re designed to kill fungus, not insects, on crops like apples.
“There’s growing evidence that fungicides may be affecting the bees on their own and I think what it highlights is a need to reassess how we label these agricultural chemicals,” Dennis van Engelsdorp, the study’s lead author, told the publication Quartz.
Labels on pesticides warn farmers not to spray when pollinating bees are in the vicinity but such precautions have not applied to fungicides. But 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.
In recent years, a class of chemicals called neonicotinoids has been linked to bee deaths and in April regulators banned the use of the pesticide for two years in Europe where bee populations have also plummeted. But van Engelsdorp, an assistant research scientist at the University of Maryland, says the new study shows that the interaction of multiple pesticides is affecting bee health.
“The pesticide issue in itself is much more complex than we have led to be- lieve,” he says. “It’s a lot more complicated than just one product, which means of course the solution does not lie in just banning one class of product.”
The study found another complication in efforts to save the bees: US honey bees, which are descendants of European bees, do not bring home pollen from native North American crops but collect bee chow from nearby weeds and wildflowers. That pollen, however, was also contaminated with pesticides even though those plants were not the target of spraying.
“It’s not clear whether the pesticides are drifting over to those plants but we need take a new look at agricultural spraying practices,” says van Engelsdorp.
So let’s go back to Rich Tucker’s truism, “If I die you die.”
To the question of Do Bees Die After They Sting You? Debbie Hadley writes on About.com:
So to my friend I say, if the bee dies, I don’t necessarily die, yayayeyaya! But then there’s Hamlet’s Soliloquy, which I have so clumsily borrowed for a title and finish, which has greater human ramifications that we can examine below . . . a priceless read for its wisdom, better even than honey for the spirit, a balm that aids the ailing world in its hostile hive, stinging back and forth for the kill.
Electromagnetic waves from cellphone towers kill bees. Lastly, an experiment conducted in the southern state of Kerala, India, found, “Found that a sudden fall in the bee population was caused by towers installed across the state by cellphone companies to increase their network.
“The electromagnetic waves emitted by the towers crippled the ‘navigational skills’ of the worker bees that go out to collect nectar from flowers to sustain bee colonies, said Dr. Sainuddin Pattazhy, who conducted the study,” the Press Trust of India news agency reported.
“He found that when a cell phone was kept near a beehive, the worker bees were unable to return, leaving the hives with only the queens and eggs and resulting in the collapse of the colony within ten days.
“Over 100,000 people in Kerala are engaged in apiculture and the dwindling worker bee population poses a threat to their livelihood. The bees also play a vital role in pollinating flowers to sustain vegetation.
“’If towers and mobile phones further increase, honey bees might be wiped out in 10 years,’ Pattazhy said.”
In closing, my apologies to Shakespeare for bowdlerizing the lead line of perhaps his greatest soliloquy in Hamlet. His timeless soliloquy is linked here . . . Rich, I want you to read this or I’ll have to submit your threat “If I die, you die,” to Facebook.
Jerry Mazza is a freelance writer and life-long resident of New York City. An EBook version of his book of poems “State Of Shock,” on 9/11 and its after effects is now available at Amazon.com and Barnesandnoble.com. He has also written hundreds of articles on politics and government as Associate Editor of Intrepid Report (formerly Online Journal). Reach him at gvmaz@verizon.net.