Why Honeybees Dont Have A Chance In The Midst Of Pesticides

[Judi Lynn]

Why Honeybees Don’t Have A Chance In The Midst Of Pesticides
Glyphosate has been touching the environment and public health in vast quantities for decades.
03/09/2017 07:26 pm ET | Updated 1 day ago


I keep writing about honeybees because in my long experience at the US Environmental Protection Agency, nothing affected me more than my discovery that the plight of the honeybees has been a result of industry malfeasance and corruption managed by the EPA. Suddenly, I could read the hidden script of modern archaeology excavating the complex codes of federal regulation, risk assessment, and environmental protection. Honeybees became the mirror of self-delusion and destruction.


It all started innocently. A few ecologists monitoring pesticides and their impact on honeybees raised the alarm as early as 1976. They wrote detailed memoranda on the hazardous and often lethal effects of neurotoxic farm insecticides on honeybees. They recommended a moratorium on such pesticides that crippled the abilities of honeybees to search for nectar and pollen and, at the same time, pollinate some of our crops.


However, by mid-1970s, America’s political class had had it with EPA, which in 1972 dared ban the king of farm sprays, DDT. So politicians tied the EPA to the profits of the industry. My colleagues’ recommendations went nowhere. EPA kept approving “bad actors,” deleterious pesticides, with far-reaching consequences not merely for honeybees but for all life.


This was astonishing to me. By the time I joined EPA, in 1979, the agency was imploding from industry corruption. With utter contempt for public and environmental health, the industry declared war on science and even the environmental laws it had drafted for the government. The agribusiness industry became the alternative model of government and society. It expected no resistance or change. EPA was simply its lapdog. But unexpected things happened.

More:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/why-honeybees-dont-have-a-chance-in-the-midst-of-pesticides_us_58c1ec02e4b0c3276fb7831c?section=us_science

[asiliveandbreathe]

1. In AZ I have 4 Queens Wreath vines on my wall and golf netting(live on GC) -

I cut them down completely end of March - they grow right back all summer and blossom in the fall.. when in full bloom (pink flower) - the honey bees come in, spend all day gathering nectar and disappear at dusk..there are times there are so many bees they actually make the vine move..I try to do my part....

The grounds keepers are very aware of my insistence they do not spray near my vines when in full bloom..they have been very accommodating..10 years now..I have tried to propagate but they seem to die off..and they are hard to find at nursery.

Tks for your post..I have been watching the efforts too to save the honey bees...

[mike_c]

2. honey bee populations are fine....

Honey bee population ecology is somewhat more complicated than the press appears to comprehend, so they often spread inaccurate and downright nonsense about the imminent demise of honey bee colonies.

First, honey bee populations are holding steady or increasing, at least in the U.S. They might be increasing elsewhere too, but the U.S. data is all that I'm familiar enough with to comment about. Their biggest threats are not pesticides used properly. Instead, pathogens and parasites like Nosema and Varroa are their worst threats. Annual hive losses are in the 15-20% range, which is not much different from historical hive turnover rates, and those hives were promptly replaced. The large winter losses attributed to CCD were on the high side, but still consistent with historical data regarding occasional population declines. Had those losses continued at 30+% every year they might have been unexpectedly extreme, but they didn't, and they weren't.

They were a cheap and easy headline though. Honey bees in trouble! We're all gonna starve! Part of the problem is that managed pollination is a big part of big ag, and honey bee population demographics is easily intermingled with the economic challenges of managed pollinator companies (any enterprise that trucks thousands of hives each year on flatbed trailers following the pollination season from the California almond orchards, then to the Midwest, and finally to New England then back to CA again the following February is a managed pollination corporation, not a pastoral bee keeper).

Consider too that Apis mellifera is a classic non-native invasive species. It was not introduced to North America for pollinating crops because pollination services were not needed-- that task was handily accomplished by native bees and other pollinators better adapted to the scale of agriculture practiced before mechanization made modern big monoculture cropping systems profitable. Honey bees were introduced to produce honey, a luxury sweetener in the days when alcohol production was a much more profitable use of sugar cane. Honey bees compete with and displace wild, native pollinators. The rise of large scale managed pollination services exactly parallels the decline of small scale family farming. There's little profit to be made except through economies of scale.

Honey bee populations naturally rise and decline in accordance with stresses such as pathogens and parasites as well as natural weather fluctuation and decidedly unnatural husbandry, e.g. hive transport, overwintering on replacement carbs, and for-profit honey theft. Prior to the CCD reports that began a few years ago there were other well documented annual hive losses that were comparable, with names like dwindling disease and winter decline (these *might* differ in some ways from CCD reports, but they were comparable in timing and scale of mortality-- and of course we cannot go back and make direct comparisons to CCD losses).

To the extent that honey bee population decline is worrisome, it's mainly worrisome for managed pollination companies whose bottom line is affected both by decreased numbers of contracts and the cost to replace hives that decline with new, healthy colonies. Honey production is still a major profit driver for managed pollination companies as well, and the cost of honey production is subjected to the same efficiency angst as any other commodity business.