One Members Harvard Study Results...

The following information was provided by HCBA club member, Roxie Pin.  If you were involved in the study and would like to share your experience with Roxie and/or the group, please email us or comment below.  roxiepin@gmail.com

I am very eager to know if others from the club had participated in the study with Dr. Lu last summer.  I am alarmed about the Dinotefuran in the honey and wanted to know if anyone else received these kinds of results!?!?

I live in a very rural area, but there are homes around where people treat their lawns. It's also very likely that there are agricultural plots where people may not be practicing organic or chemical free pest control.

I am devastated.  I also am 98% sure that hive is... dead.

Did anyone talk about this study? Do you know if anyone else participated? I am going to follow up with Dr. Lu, but in the meantime, I'd love to gather more ammunition to fight for the case to eliminate this crap.

Thanks, and hope all is well with you.  I do miss the camaraderie of the meetings.

Roxie

Dear Roxanne,

We appreciate your participation in the MassBee Study since 2013 and your patience for the results to be available to you. 

Here are the pesticide concentrations in the pollen and honey samples that you sent to us. Those pesticides are neonicotinoid insecticides, which have been implicated for the cause of colony collapse disorder, or CCD.

In addition, we would like to ask you several short questions, in specific to the hive that you collected samples for us. Your answers will be a huge compliment to the overall results. You can just write the answer below each question, and then send this email back to us.

We are preparing to publish the data without the identify of your hive. Upon the acceptance of the manuscript for peer-review publishing, we will send you a copy for your reference. We thank you again for your enthusiastic help in this project. Please do not hesitate to contact us for any questions you may have.

HERE ARE YOUR RESULTS. 

The concentration unit is ppb (parts per billion). BLOQ stands for below the limit of quantification, or close to non-detectable.

Month	Dinotefuran	Acetamiprid	Flonicamid	Clothianidin		Thiacloprid	Imidacloprid	Nitenpyram	Thiamethoxam
April	BLOQ	BLOQ	BLOQ	BLOQ	BLOQ	BLOQ	BLOQ	BLOQ
May	BLOQ	BLOQ	BLOQ	BLOQ	BLOQ	0.1	BLOQ	BLOQ
June	BLOQ	BLOQ	BLOQ	BLOQ	BLOQ	0.6	BLOQ	BLOQ
July	0.6	BLOQ	BLOQ	BLOQ	BLOQ	3.9	BLOQ	BLOQ
August-pollen	BLOQ	BLOQ	BLOQ	BLOQ	BLOQ	BLOQ	BLOQ	BLOQ
August-honey	14.5	BLOQ	BLOQ	BLOQ	BLOQ	0.5	BLOQ	BLOQ

Chensheng (Alex) Lu, PhD
Associate Professor of Environmental Exposure Biology
Dept. of Environmental Health
Harvard School of Public Health

Office - Landmark Center West 404G

401 Park Drive, Boston MA 02215

Lab - Bldg 1, Rm G-5, 10, & 12

665 Huntington Ave, Boston MA 02115
Tel: (617)998-8811
Fax: (617)384-8728

Dear Dr. Lu,

Thank you so much for allowing me to participate in this study.  In all honesty, I am shocked and devastated by the Dinotefuran level in my honey.  I've sold this honey to my neighbors ~ one of whom is a 45-year-old pregnant woman who is trying to do everything possible to bring health to her unborn child due in 4 weeks. This is only my second year with a harvest and because I had honey to spare, when I put it up for sale, this woman bought a lot. The other woman who I am concerned about is a cancer patient. She bought it believing in all the healthy benefits....

I don't know what this number means, but I feel like I have not only destroyed their good intentions, but made them worse. Furthermore, my family has eaten a LOT of this honey. I started raising bees for the health benefit ~ not to increase my risk factors!!

Maybe my responses to your questions will help you understand my concerns. 

HERE ARE THE QUESTIONS:

1. Have your hive died in 2013/2014?

Yes, I collected all pollen and honey from just this hive and I am 98% sure it is dead.  If we ever get a warm enough day in the near future, I will confirm.  I do not chemically treat for mites. This hive also had a queen replacement.  It was originally an Italian queen and I only had a carniolian queen available.  By the end of the summer, the worker bees observed going in and out were mostly all carniolian.  Another difference between this hive and my other hive is that these bees in this hive were very reluctant to take any supplemental food in the fall. 

1a. If your hive is dead, do you see a load of dead bees at the bottom board of the hive, or your dead hive is relatively empty?

Will respond to this question later once an inspection has been made.

1b. If your hive is dead, do you know when approximately?

There was activity three weeks ago (like Feb 8-9), but it was not strong and the temperature was too cold to do a thorough inspection. The last two times I went out after that when clearing around the hives from the storms, I have not been able to hear buzzing when I knock on that hive, but the neighboring hive does respond. I'm fairly certain it is dead or close to dead and have ordered a package of bees to replace this hive.

1c. If your hive is alive, is it normal, weaker than normal, or very weak?

If it is still alive, it is VERY weak. I would have called it very weak when I went in that second weekend in February.

2. How do you describe the location of where you set up this hive, urban, sub-urban, or rural?

I live in Huntington, MA.  It is very rural, 2,500-3,000 population, mountainous with the Westfield River running by the property.  We are starting a Christmas Tree Farm on the property.

3.  Are there any agricultural field nearby your hive location (within 2-3 miles)?

There are no known big agricultural fields near me.  I do have smaller plot farmers that I know are using organic controls with pests. There are homes around me where people treat their lawns, including a guy on the hill immediately across the street who works for a lawn company catering to the suburbs. He is obsessed with his lawn and other neighbors have long been concerned about him and the chemicals that come tumbling down the hill in rain storms toward us.  It's also very likely that there are interspersed agricultural plots where people may not be practicing organic or chemical free pest control within the radius. 

 I honestly thought that my rural living should have come up with much clearer results. I am sick about these results and the chemical impact on us.  Should I throw out any remaining honey? I need to understand these numbers.

Thank you,

Roxie

Dear Roxie,

I can understand your remorse after seeing the results. I don't think you are responsible for this. Neither do your bees. We have analyzed organic honey samples in a separate study, and found high levels of neonicotinoids too. Only one honey sample has no neonicotinoids. Yes, only one!!!  Since neonicotinoids are so ubiquitous and systemic in plants, they are everywhere once applied. And they will be persistent in the environment too.  I conduct this study aiming to raise the awareness of the danger of neonicotinoids. Our government needs to answer this question of "why your bees could take home with so much of imidacloprid and dinotefuran? In your case, not only those pesticides are harming your bees, but also you and whoever consume your honey.  

I do not know what those numbers mean either. But those are very bad pesticides (neurotoxins).   I don't know how you should inform your friends who bought your honey for the purpose of being organic consumers either. It is a shame to throw the honey away, but knowing that your honey contains two neonicotinoids, I would not continue to eat those.

However, I do hope that you could find out where dinotefuran comes from. The landscaping neighbor on the hill might be a good starting point. As you probably know that bees only forage 2-3 miles from their hives so it has to be a specific use of dinotefuran around your hives. Do you know where your bees go out to get nectar (what plants, trees, or flowers)?

I apologize for making you very uncomfortable about the results. I hope to make the best use of those results so we make some changes. 

Best wishes.

Chensheng (Alex) Lu, PhD
Associate Professor of Environmental Exposure Biology
Dept. of Environmental Health
Harvard School of Public Health

Office - Landmark Center West 404G

401 Park Drive, Boston MA 02215

Lab - Bldg 1, Rm G-5, 10, & 12

665 Huntington Ave, Boston MA 02115
Tel: (617)998-8811
Fax: (617)384-8728