Widely used pesticides causing long term decline of honeybees

[Luddly Neddite]

Can someone please explain to me me how MindWars and other RWNJs vote to kill bees and then whine and bitch that the bees are dying?

[emoji780]


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[Luddly Neddite]

Pesticides kill more than bees. Poison any animal and there is always collateral damage. I've seen so many raptors die from eating poisoned rodents.

For those who think that doesn't matter, one barn owl will kill around 11K rodents is his/her life. Those are rats and mice that are not eating and fouling our grain stores.

Whether vegetarian or meat eater, raptors safe us money at the grocery store.

Same with snakes, btw.


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[theHawk]

Here ...... the green fascists are trying to start another hysteria...

Bee decline ‘not caused by pesticides’

“The lab study certainly seemed very clear that low levels of pesticides were impacting on honey bee health. But when we look in the field we don’t see the same results. Even when colonies that were exposed to low levels we’re not seeing outbreaks of the gut parasite pathogen that we saw in the lab,” said Dr Jeff Pettis of the US Agricultural Research Service.

The US is a different story from Europe.

The honeybee isn't indigenous to North America, and pesticides must be used to kill mites and other things that normally attack the honeybees. The crops they are used to pollinate are also non-indigenous to North America, requiring pesticides to keep the crops alive, but can be harmful to the bees.

The bee hives are usually transported commercially to different farms across the country in horrid conditions, leading to deaths of bees during transport, and thus infection of bees, requiring more drugs to be pumped into them to keep them alive artificially.

Bees die off in big numbers all the time simply because it's an artificial ecosystem. The bees don't belong in North America and neither do the crops they pollinate, at least not naturally.

 

[badger2]

Green fascism is square miles of monocropped Iowa corn.

 

[waltky]

And they wonder why the bees are dyin' off...

Not So Sweet: 75 Percent of Honey Samples Had Key Pesticide
October 05, 2017 > When researchers collected honey samples from around the world, they found that three-quarters of them had a common type of pesticide suspected of playing a role in the decline of bees. Even honey from the island paradise of Tahiti had the chemical.

That demonstrates how pervasive a problem the much-debated pesticide is for honeybees, said authors of a study published Thursday in the journal Science. They said it is not a health problem for people because levels were far below governments' thresholds on what's safe to eat. "What this shows is the magnitude of the contamination," said study lead author Edward Mitchell, a biology professor at the University of Neuchatel in Switzerland, adding that there are "relatively few places where we did not find any." Over the past few years, several studies — in the lab and the field — link insecticides called neonicotinoids, or neonics, to reduced and weakened honeybee hives, although pesticide makers dispute those studies. Neonics work by attacking an insect's central nervous system.

Volunteers check honeybee hives for queen activity and perform routine maintenance as part of a collaboration between the Cincinnati Zoo and TwoHoneys Bee Co. at EcOhio Farm in Mason, Ohio​

Bees and other pollinators have been on the decline for more than a decade and experts blame a combination of factors: neonics, parasites, disease, climate change and lack of a diverse food supply. Honeybees don't just make honey; about one-third of the human diet comes from plants that are pollinated by the insects. Bees pick up the pesticide when they feed on fields grown from treated seeds. As part of a citizen science project, the Swiss researchers asked other experts, friends and relatives to ship them honey samples. More than 300 samples arrived and researchers tested 198 of them for five of the most common types of neonics. Overall, 75 percent of the samples had at least one neonic, 45 percent had two or more, and 10 percent had four or more.

St. Thomas More Academy students sample honey sticks during a tour of the Bayer North American Bee Care Center in Research Triangle Park, N.C.​

Results varied by region. In North America, 86 percent of samples had the pesticide; Asia, 80 percent; Europe, where there's a partial ban, 79 percent; Africa, 73 percent; the Australian region, 71 percent and South America, 57 percent. The study found that nearly half of the honey samples exceeded a level of the pesticide that some previous research said weakens bees, but the pesticide makers say otherwise. An outside expert, University of Nebraska's Judy Wu-Smart, said the study used too few honey samples to make the broad conclusions the researchers did. Ann Bryan, spokeswoman for Syngenta which makes the neonic thiamethoxam, said the amount of the pesticide found in honey samples "are 50 times lower than what could cause possible effects on bees." Jeffrey Donald, a spokesman for Bayer Crop Science which makes the neonic clothianidin, said the study "perpetuates the myth that exposure to low levels of neonicotinoids implies risk, even though there is no compelling scientific evidence to support this conclusion."

The study authors likened neonics to DDT, the pesticide in the 1960s linked to declines in bald eagles and other birds. They said neonics are dangerous to all sorts of insects, even ladybugs. University of Illinois bee expert Sydney Cameron and other scientists said those comparisons aren't right because neonics don't stay in an animal's system like DDT did and are applied to seeds and not sprayed in mass quantities. "This is an important paper if for no other reason that it will attract a great deal of attention to the mounting problem of worldwide dependence on agrochemicals, the side effects of which we know relatively little," Cameron said in an email. She wasn't part of the study. One side benefit of collecting honey is that researchers could sample some. Mitchell's favorite is a dark and bitter honey from Africa. He called the honey fantastic, but added "I couldn't eat it all the time. It was just too strong."

Not So Sweet: 75 Percent of Honey Samples Had Key Pesticide