US Retailers Look to Limit Pesticides...

U.S. retailers look to limit pesticides to help honeybees

BY CAREY GILLAM

Wed Jun 25, 2014 2:36pm EDT

(Reuters) - Home Depot (HD.N) and other U.S. companies are working to eliminate or limit use of a type of pesticide suspected of helping cause dramatic declines in honeybee populations needed to pollinate key American crops, officials said on Wednesday.

The moves include requiring suppliers to label any plants treated with neonicotinoid, or neonic, pesticides sold through home and garden stores.

Atlanta-based Home Depot, the world's largest home improvement retailer, is requiring its suppliers to start such labeling by the fourth quarter of this year, said Ron Jarvis, the company's vice president of merchandising/sustainability. Home Depot is also running tests in several states to see if suppliers can eliminate neonics in their plant production without hurting plant health, he said.

"The Home Depot is deeply engaged in understanding the relationship of the use of certain insecticides on our live goods and the decline in the honeybee population," Jarvis said in an email.

Also on Wednesday, BJ's Wholesale Club [BJ.UL], a warehouse retailer with more than 200 locations along the East Coast, said it was asking all of its vendors to provide plants free of neonics by the end of 2014 or to label such products as requiring "caution around pollinators" like bees.

At least 10 other smaller retailers, with locations in Minnesota, Colorado, Maryland and California, have announced plans to limit or eliminate neonics from plant products.

The class of pesticides known as neonics are sold by agrichemical companies to boost yields of staple crops such as corn, but are also used widely on annual and perennial plants used in lawns and gardens.

A report issued on Wednesday by the environmental group Friends of the Earth said that 36 out of 71, or 51 percent, of garden plant samples purchased at top garden retailers in 18 cities in the United States and Canada contained neonic pesticides.

Scientists, consumer groups, beekeepers and others say bee deaths are linked to the neonic pesticides. But Monsanto, (MON.N), Bayer (BAYGn.DE) and other agrichemical companies say a mix of factors such as mites are killing the bees.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates total losses of managed honeybee colonies at 23 percent over the winter of 2013-14, the latest in a series of annual declines.

Last week, the White House announced a plan to fund new honeybee habitats and to form a task force to study how to reverse the honeybee declines. The bee die-off is worrisome for agriculture because honeybees pollinate plants that produce about a fourth of the food consumed by Americans.

An analysis of 800 peer-reviewed studies released this week by the Task Force on Systemic Pesticides, a group of scientists from several countries, concluded that neonics were a key factor in bee declines and had other harmful effects on the environment.

(Reporting by Carey Gillam in Kansas City; Editing by Jonathan Oatis)

ORIGINAL SOURCE:  REUTERS

Spider Venom May Save the Bees...

Spider venom may save the bees
Bee populations, both wild and captive, are in decline in Europe, the Americas and Asia for reasons scientists are struggling to understand

PARIS - Venom from one of the world's most poisonous spiders may help save the world's honeybees, providing a biopesticide that kills pests but spares the precious pollinators, a study said Wednesday.

Bee populations, both wild and captive, are in decline in Europe, the Americas and Asia for reasons scientists are struggling to understand, with industrial pesticides among the suspected culprits.

Last year, scientists said certain pesticides used to protect crops or bee hives can scramble the brain circuits of honeybees, affecting memory and navigation skills they need to find food, placing entire hives under threat.

The EU has since placed a temporary ban on some of these chemicals.

Now a team led by Newcastle University, England, found that a biopesticide made with a toxin from Australian funnel web spider (below) venom and a protein from the snowdrop plant, was bee-friendly.

"Feeding acute and chronic doses to honeybees, beyond the levels they would ever experience in the field... had only a very slight effect on the bees' survival and no measurable effect at all on their learning and memory," said a university statement.

Neither adult bees nor larvae were affected, said the study published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

The biopesticide was previously shown not to be harmful to humans, despite being highly toxic to a number of key pests.

Bees account for 80 percent of plant pollination by insects. Without them, many crops would be unable to bear fruit or would have to be pollinated by hand.

The Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO) says pollinators contribute to at least 70 percent of the major human food crops.

The economic value of pollination services was estimated at 153 billion euros ($208 billion) in 2005.

"There isn't going to be one silver bullet," said study co-author Angharad Gatehouse.

"What we need is an integrated pest management strategy and insect-specific pesticides will be just one part of that."

ORIGINAL SOURCE:  New Vision

Neonicotinoid Study...

Study strengthens link between neonicotinoids and collapse of honey bee colonies

For immediate release: May 9, 2014

Boston, MA — Two widely used neonicotinoids—a class of insecticide—appear to significantly harm honey bee colonies over the winter, particularly during colder winters, according to a new study from Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH). The study replicated a 2012 finding from the same research group that found a link between low doses of imidacloprid and Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD), in which bees abandon their hives over the winter and eventually die. The new study also found that low doses of a second neonicotinoid, clothianidin, had the samenegative effect.

Further, although other studies have suggested that CCD-related mortality in honey bee colonies may come from bees’ reduced resistance to mites or parasites as a result of exposure to pesticides, the new study found that bees in the hives exhibiting CCD had almost identical levels of pathogen infestation as a group of control hives, most of which survived the winter. This finding suggests that the neonicotinoids are causing some other kind of biological mechanism in bees that in turn leads to CCD.

The study appears online May 9, 2014 in the Bulletin of Insectology.

“We demonstrated again in this study that neonicotinoids are highly likely to be responsible for triggering CCD in honey bee hives that were healthy prior to the arrival of winter,” said lead author Chensheng (Alex) Lu, associate professor of environmental exposure biology at HSPH.

Since 2006, there have been significant losses of honey bees from CCD. Pinpointing the cause is crucial to mitigating this problem since bees are prime pollinators of roughly one-third of all crops worldwide. Experts have considered a number of possible causes, including pathogen infestation, beekeeping practices, and pesticide exposure. Recent findings, including a 2012 study by Lu and colleagues, suggest that CCD is related specifically to neonicotinoids, which may impair bees’ neurological functions. Imidacloprid and clothianidin both belong to this group.

Lu and his co-authors from the Worcester County Beekeepers Association studied the health of 18 bee colonies in three locations in central Massachusetts from October 2012 through April 2013. At each location, the researchers separated six colonies into three groups—one treated with imidacloprid, one with clothianidin, and one untreated.

There was a steady decline in the size of all the bee colonies through the beginning of winter—typical among hives during the colder months in New England. Beginning in January 2013, bee populations in the control colonies began to increase as expected, but populations in the neonicotinoid-treated hives continued to decline. By April 2013, 6 out of 12 of the neonicotinoid-treated colonies were lost, with abandoned hives that are typical of CCD. Only one of the control colonies was lost—thousands of dead bees were found inside the hive—with what appeared to be symptoms of a common intestinal parasite called Nosema ceranae.

While the 12 pesticide-treated hives in the current study experienced a 50% CCD mortality rate, the authors noted that, in their 2012 study, bees in pesticide-treated hives had a much higher CCD mortality rate—94%. That earlier bee die-off occurred during the particularly cold and prolonged winter of 2010-2011 in central Massachusetts, leading the authors to speculate that colder temperatures, in combination with neonicotinoids, may play a role in the severity of CCD.

“Although we have demonstrated the validity of the association between neonicotinoids and CCD in this study, future research could help elucidate the biological mechanism that is responsible for linking sub-lethal neonicotinoid exposures to CCD,” said Lu. “Hopefully we can reverse the continuing trend of honey bee loss.”

Funding for the study came from Wells Fargo Foundation and the Breck Fund at the Harvard University Center for the Environment.

“Sub-lethal exposure to neonicotinoids impaired honey bees winterization before proceeding to colony collapse disorder,” Chensheng Lu, Kenneth M. Warchol, Richard A. Callahan, Bulletin of Insectology, online Friday, May 9, 2014

For more information:

Marge Dwyer
mhdwyer@hsph.harvard.edu
617.432.8416

photo: iStockphoto.com

###

Harvard School of Public Health brings together dedicated experts from many disciplines to educate new generations of global health leaders and produce powerful ideas that improve the lives and health of people everywhere. As a community of leading scientists, educators, and students, we work together to take innovative ideas from the laboratory to people’s lives—not only making scientific breakthroughs, but also working to change individual behaviors, public policies, and health care practices. Each year, more than 400 faculty members at HSPH teach 1,000-plus full-time students from around the world and train thousands more through online and executive education courses. Founded in 1913 as the Harvard-MIT School of Health Officers, the School is recognized as America’s oldest professional training program in public health.

ORIGINAL SOURCE:  HARVARD

Ted Talks- "Why Bees Are Disappearing"

Speakers: Marla Spivak: Bees Scholar

Marla Spivak researches bees’ behavior and biology in an effort to preserve this threatened, but ecologically essential, insect.insect.

Whh

Why you should listen to her:

Bees pollinate a third of our food supply -- they don’t just make honey! -- but colonies have been disappearing at alarming rates in many parts of the world due to the accumulated effects of parasitic mites, viral and bacterial diseases, and exposure to pesticides and herbicides. Marla Spivak, University of Minnesota professor of entomology and 2010 MacArthur Fellow, tries as much as possible to think like bees in her work to protect them. They’re “highly social and complex” creatures, she says, which fuels her interest and her research.

Spivak has developed a strain of bees, the Minnesota Hygienic line, that can detect when pupae are infected and kick them out of the nest, saving the rest of the hive. Now, Spivak is studying how bees collect propolis, or tree resins, in their hives to keep out dirt and microbes. She is also analyzing how flowers’ decline due to herbicides, pesticides and crop monoculture affect bees’ numbers and diversity. Spivak has been stung by thousands of bees in the course of her work.

"Bees have a champion in Marla Spivak."

The Promised Land

ORIGINAL SOURCE:  TED Ideas Worth Spreading

Bees with Backpacks...

Scientists Strap Tiny 'Backpacks' To 5,000 Bees To Learn More About Colony Collapse Disorder

From Mother Nature Network's Laura Moss:

There's been a lot of buzz about colony collapse disorder, a phenomenon causing bees to die off around the world, and Australian scientists are trying a new approach to studying the phenomenon: They're attaching tiny sensors to bees.

More than 5,000 honeybees are being equipped with 2.5mm x 2.5mm sensors that relay data to recorders placed around hives and known food sources.

"Bees are social insects that return to the same point and operate on a very predictable schedule," project leader Dr. Paulo de Souza, a scientist at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization, said in a statement.

"Any change in their behavior indicates a change in their environment. If we can model their movements, we'll be able to recognize very quickly when their activity shows variation and identify the cause. This will help us understand how to maximize their productivity as well as monitor for any biosecurity risks."

But how do you attach a sensor to a tiny honeybee?
Good question. It turns out that it's not that complicated.

1. Refrigerate the bee.
"We take the bee into a cold place, usually to a fridge about 5 degrees Celsius (41 degrees F), for five minutes and that is enough to have the bees sleeping," de Souza told the Australian Broadcasting Company.

2. Shave the bee. (Yes, really.)
"Very young bees, they're very hairy. At times we need to do something to help us," he said.

3. Use tweezers to glue the sensor to the bee's back.
"It doesn't disturb the way the bee will see or the way the bee will fly, they just work normally," he said.

"Each sensor weight is about 5 milligrams. This is about 20 percent of what the bee can carry. So the bee can carry a lot of weight in pollen, in nectar, so this is like someone carrying a small backpack."

Buzz off
Once their sensors are in place, the honeybees are released in Tasmania, an island state located off Australia's coast.

The radio frequency identification sensors will allow scientists to build a 3-D image of the bees' movements and provide them with information on how pesticides contribute to colony collapse disorder.

But tagging the bees is only the first stage of the project.

De Souza said researchers are working to make the sensors even smaller so they can be attached to insects like mosquitoes and fruit flies.

"We want these smaller tags to be able to sense environmental conditions such as temperature and presence of atmospheric gases; not just track their location. Further to this, the sensors will be able to generate energy from the beating wings of the insects, which will give the sensors enough power to transmit information instead of just storing it until they reach a data logger," he said.

*ORIGINAL SOURCE:  HUFFINGTON POST

Buzz off, Monsanto!

Last week, the term “bee-washing” emerged in public conversation. It doesn’t refer to some new bee cleaning service, but to the insidious efforts of Monsanto and other pesticide corporations to discredit science about the impacts of pesticides on bees — especially neonicotinoids — by creating public relations tours, new research centers and new marketing strategies.

This week, pesticide makers are showcasing these tactics during National Pollinator Week with offers of free seed packets to people who take their poorly named “pollinator pledge.” The “bee-washing” term has gained traction as scientists and groups like PAN continue to cut through the misinformation and point to the emerging body of science that points to pesticides as a critical factor in bee declines.

Monsanto hosted their first so-called Honey Bee Health Summit last week, a gathering at the company’s headquarters in Missouri. Without question, some truly smart, dedicated scientists attended Monsanto's bee summit and are participating in these efforts.

And a similarly committed group of beekeepers who care about bees, beekeeping and our food system have also participated. What’s increasingly clear, though, is that the credibility of these individuals is being used to shield the agenda of a handful of pesticide corporations and their bee-harming insecticide products. The corporate PR gymnastics on display are truly impressive.

Unfortunately, Monsanto is not alone in its efforts.  Just this spring, Bayer sponsored a tour of its “specially-wrapped beehicle” and hosted a talk at Ohio State University in March, over loud objections from local beekeepers. 

Not here. Look over there!

Industry has largely set its sights on one issue to blame for bee declines. While lack of sufficient forage and diseases are a challenge to bee health and beekeeping, challenges exacerbated by the weakening effect of pesticides on bees, the pesticide industry has focused a large proportion of its attention on the varroa mite. And it’s an easy distraction that places the burden of unprecedented bee losses on beekeepers — while subverting any blame for the widespread pesticide products.

Unfortunately for Monsanto & Co, and as most beekeepers and academics will say, the varroa mite has been around a long time, predating dramatic bee declines in U.S. that started in 2006. While mites no doubt affect bee colonies, they are unlikely the primary driver of population declines.

There is a correlation, however, between the introduction of neonicotinoid pesticides (or neonics) on the market and bee die-offs. Independent studies show — and beekeepers corroborate from hands-on experience — that these pesticides weaken bees' immune systems, likely damaging their resistance to common challenges like the varroa mite.

Neonics are one of the largest growth sectors for the pesticide industry. And industry has a vested interest in keeping the neonic market growing. But we know that spin efforts to refocus attention on varroa mites were already attempted in Europe, and the approach has been largely unsuccessful. The EU just put continent-wide restrictions on the use of neonics in place.

Bees are still dying

Pesticide corporations don’t show any sign of letting up. If this spring and summer are any indication, then the “bee-washing” campaign will continue. Beekeepers will remain the victims of this targeted PR campaign.

And the costs of are very real. Earlier this month, Jim Doan — a third generation commercial beekeeper from upstate New York — literally sold his farm due to bee losses. For years, he produced over half a million pounds of honey annually and eventually grew his business to 5,300 hives. But when neonicotinoid pesticides started being commonly used in the U.S., around 2006, Jim's bees started dying.

He’s experienced serious losses to bees he brought to citrus groves in Florida and the cornfields of New York. And now, he only has 300 hives left. In an email he circulated last week, he wrote:

“I am done. I cannot continue. Sold my farm 2 weeks ago, I am giving up, there is no hope here."

Bees are continuing to die off at unprecedented rates and beekeepers are going out of business. There is clearly something amiss — and the pesticide industry would have us believe that their products play no part in this alarming trend. PAN, beekeepers and our partners will continue to shine a light on corporate "bee-washing" and spin efforts to subdue or obfuscate the growing body of science pointing to this clear message: pesticides are playing a key role in bee deaths.

*ORIGINAL SOURCE:  PAN North American

Bill Crawford, Professional Beekeeper- UPDATE...

Hello Hampden County beekeepers,  

I hope everyone and their bees are doing well.   As some of you had heard, I have decided to jump to beekeeping on the commercial level.   I starting this summer by subcontracting to a beekeeper in the South Dakota praire during the Sweet Clover flow, running about 4500 hives, mostly alone.  I worked there for about 7 weeks until arranging to work for my friend of mine's father with about 3000 hives near Gettysburg, PA.  I worked there for about a month, splitting hives and preparing the hives for fall and winter.  When the labor demand there began to slow down, a friend of my boss said his friend in Lewisburg, PA.  As it turns out, I am now sub-contracting long term for Hackenberg Apiaries, the first people to be hit with and blow the whistle on Colony Collapse Disorder.  The owner is a very outspoken critic of the chemical and pesticide industry.  He has been featured on 60 minutes for talking about CCD and have been featured in the recent bee documentary movies.   I plan on working here for a couple years, that is until I break off to return to Mass with 600-1000 hives.  

With my current gig, I am able to come home on weekends if I so choose, allowing me to continue with my local honey sales and to run hives in both Massachusetts and Pennsylvania with some additional ones in New York.  As the situation works,  as I work for the family, they will in turn also be helping me grow to the point where I can break off on my own.  The apiary I am now working for are primarily pollinators, after beefing up the hives in Florida and Georgia in January, bees are sent to almonds in February,  then later in the season to pollinate blueberries, apples, and pumpkins, and after all is said and done, placed for summer and fall honey.

I have learned NUMEROUS things over the past few months, way too many to list.  But the thing that makes one a better beekeeper, is learning from your mistakes, and mistakes of others.  

The beekeepers nationwide this fall, are suffering major losses, with a good portion losing over half already.  For us, we have already lost almost half due to corn and soybean pesticides, varroa mites, viruses, and CCD.  Just this morning, I went around and checked about 1700-1800 hives divided into your bee yards for blown off lids from the storm, we ended up losing about 100 hives to drowning.

I hope by this time, everyone has their hives fed and have proper weight, with mouseguards on.  If you think of treating for nosema now, dont, it was too late and you will do more harm than good, as the hives tend to go downhill for a little while after treatment before getting back on track.  Raise you outter cover up about a half an inch to help expell moisture and keep the hives out of the bears reach.  I will be down south with my boss and I's bees and will be back in April.    I will send out another message soon regarding nucs and detail if anyone is interested, my coworker, my boss, and myself will be making nucs for sale once our bees get back from almonds, and if there areenough people interested I could bring a load to mass for people, they definitely have an edge over packages, 4-5 frames of bees with a laying queen.  

If anyone has any questions, don't hesitate to email me.
Bee Well,
Bill Crawford
Billy81389@aol.com

Monsanto Boycott...

This morning, I received a link in my email from Tom Flebotte, with the subject "Fox in the Beehouse", knowing that would not be a link to good news, I clicked through to the following...

 GMO AND THE DEVASTATION OF BEE COLONIES: Blamed for Bee Collapse, Monsanto Buys Leading Bee Research Firm by Anthony Gucciardi

I was amazed and disgusted as I know many of you were from the feedback I received when I forwarded this article. What can we do? Well, new HCBA member, Laura Martin has an answer! Here is an excerpt from Laura's email to me...

...I read it and it makes me very worried for the future of bees.
It also made me angry.
So, I did some research to find out what companies Monsanto owns or has a hand in. I'd like to boycott all things Monsanto. But after reading this article, I discovered that Monsanto's reach is so vast that it's very difficult to completely boycott them and all that they produce. However, I'm still going to try to boycott as many of Monsanto's products as I possibly can. I've included the link to the article I read, "A Month Without Monsanto"

To make boycotting Monsanto a bit more manageable for folks, here's a link that lists some specific products made by Monsanto that you can avoid buying.

Every little bit can make a difference, so if you feel like Laura does, she's already done the research for you. Now get to the boycotting! A big thank you to Laura for sharing this information. If anyone has anything to add, please comment below.