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

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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

Wintering a Beehive in New England with the Gleasons...

Thanks to club members Dan and Joseph Gleason for sharing their new over-wintering experience!

Insecticide?

Time magazine recently featured the honeybees' struggle on their cover.  It's nice to see the subject getting more and more attention.  

Unfortunately, some of what's killing the bees has recently directly effected one of our members.  HCBA Trustee, Larry Borysyk, recently sent me this photo of the front of his hive. 

All the bees on the ground near the hive are dead.  Larry thinks they may be victims of insecticide.  If so, let's hope the effects on the hive are limited and they recover and gain strength to be ready to over-winter! 

Thanks for sharing this with us, Larry!

Hive Loss, Wax Moths, and Storage...

HCBA member Sage Franetovich sent the following inquiry via email, and has allowed me to share it here, so that the information may be of help to others too. 

I had one hive that was started with a new colony this spring.  Unfortunately, I lost all my bees and the honey to robbers (wasps and other bees).  It happened so quickly!  After the robbing, I opened my hive and found empty cells and wax moth larvae and webbing.  So, I am wondering what to do next.  How can I clean up my hive and safely store it for the winter?  I would like to use the same hive next year and minimize buying new equipment.  Any advice would be appreciated. Thank you!
~Sage

The dreaded wax moth.

I stole this picture from Google images, but this is an example of a frame with minimal damage from wax moths.

When I receive an email inquiry from one of our members, I forward the message to some of our most experience members and enlist their help.  Below is a response from our VP Jeff Rhys...

Bee keeping can be frustrating sometimes. But with each new challenge you overcome the better beekeeper you become First you need to get rid of any active wax moth to prevent further damage. This can be done by freezing the hive for a couple of days. Then it will depend on how much damage was done to the comb to see if any can be saved. If the damage was advanced you will need to take each frame and remove the damaged comb and install new foundation. If there is only a small amount of damage you can clean each frame as best you can and let the bees finish repairing the comb next year. Remove all traces of wax moth from frames and boxes and then properly store your equipment to prevent any more damage from the wax moths. Hope this helps.
~Jeff Rys

I think Jeff's answer is great, and if you'd like to add some helpful advice for Sage, or anyone else reading this post, please do so in the comments section below.