From: The Wall Street Journal
Misguided rules on pesticide use could be a threat to the very honeybees the EU is trying to save.
By Jon Entine
Science can’t be rushed. Usually legislators make policy decisions on controversial issues only after carefully weighing current research. But just the opposite has unfolded in the EU. European Commissioners last year passed a two-year ban on a class of pesticides known as neonicotinoids in a preemptive move to protect honeybees, after sketchy reports of higher-than-normal winter deaths among the arthropods. Now the unintended consequences of what seems like a hasty decision are emerging.
June 6, 2014
From: Mount Pleasent Daily Voice
by Sam Barron
VALHALLA, N.Y. — A Westlake High School student won an Acorda Scientific Excellence Award for her study of bees.
Sarah Marino, a 17-year-old Valhalla resident, won an award for her project, “Colony Collapse Disorder: Controlling Varroa Destructor Mites in Honeybee Hives.”
Marino began her project after hearing about colony collapse disorder, which involves bees suddenly disappearing.
Read Complete Article
June 3, 2014
Editor’s Note: The Australian regulatory agency’s full color warning flyer about Varroa destructor is available here. Below is a brief excerpt that explains why the Australian government recognizes the varroa mites to be the greatest threat to bee health.
From: Australian Government
Varroa mites feed and reproduce on larvae and pupae, causing malformation and weakening of honey bees as well as transmitting numerous viruses. Heavy Varroa mite infestations can build up in 3-4 years and cause scattered brood, crippled and crawling honey bees, a reduction in honey bee population, supersedure of queen bees and ultimate colony breakdown and death of the hive.
June 2, 2014
Editor’s Note: The complete article, “A restatement of the natural science evidence base concerning neonicotinoid insecticides and insect pollinators” published by The Proceedings of the Roay Academy B is available here. Below are excepts.
There is clear evidence of the great value of neonicotinoids in agriculture as well as the importance of the ecosystem services provided to agriculture by managed and wild pollinators.
Different stakeholders will quite naturally differ in the weightings they attach to the variety of objectives affected by insecticide use, and there is no unique answer to the question of how best to regulate neonicotinoids, an issue that inevitably has both economic and political dimensions. But economic and political arguments need to be consistent with the natural science evidence base, even though the latter will always be less complete than desirable.
Neonicotinoids are efficient plant protection compounds and if their use is restricted farmers may switch to other pest-management strategies (for example, different insecticides applied in different ways or non-chemical control measures) that may have effects on pollinator populations that could overall be more or less damaging than neonicotinoids. Alternatively, they may choose not to grow the crops concerned, which will reduce exposure of pollinators to neonicotinoids but also reduce the total flowers available to pollinators
May 29, 2014
From: Associated Press via The Republic
By BLAKE NICHOLSON
BISMARCK, North Dakota — Beekeepers in the nation’s top honey-producing state are getting help through a product tied to a plant typically associated with beer.
The federal government is once again allowing North Dakota beekeepers to use Hopguard pesticide — made from an extract of the hop plant — to control a pest thought to be connected to colony collapse disorder.
“Left uncontrolled, varroa mites cause deep and widespread losses in bee colonies,” Agriculture Commissioner Doug Goehring said. “They are the most serious pest problem facing beekeepers.”
May 27, 2014
Editor’s Note: The original research article, “Identification of developmentally-specific kinotypes and mechanisms of Varroa mite resistance through whole-organism, kinome analysis of honeybee,” by Albert J. Robertson, Breet Trost, et al, published in Frontiers in Genetics is available here. Below is an excerpt from the Abstract.
Recent investigations associate Varroa destructor (Mesostigmata: Varroidae) parasitism and its associated pathogens and agricultural pesticides with negative effects on colony health, resulting in sporadic global declines in domestic honeybee (Apis mellifera) populations. These events have motivated efforts to develop research tools that can offer insight into the causes of declining bee health as well as identify biomarkers to guide breeding programs. Here we report the development of a bee-specific peptide array for characterizing global cellular kinase activity in whole bee extracts. The arrays reveal distinct, developmentally-specific signaling profiles between bees with differential susceptibility to infestation by Varroa mites.
May 22, 2014
From: The Conversation
A tiny mite has been killing honey bees all around the world, and will inevitably reach Australian shores. So what is this destructive mite, and what we can do to protect Australian honey bees?
The Varroa mite, also known as Varroa destructor, is only the size of a pin head but it is the most serious threat to the viability of the Australian honey bee industry.
The mite is parasitic and feeds on the blood of adult and larval honey bees. It also transmits viral and other pathogens, which kill entire bee colonies. Varroa mite is part of the syndrome leading to honey bee declines in many places around the world.
May 20, 2014
From: ScientificBeekeeping.com, Beekeeping Through the Eyes of a Biologist
The New “Harvard Study” on neonics, May 2014
Dr. Lu of Harvard Medical School, who has no background with honey bees, attempted to run an experiment in 2012 (The 2012 Harvard Study) that would “prove” that the seed treatment of corn put so much imidacloprid into high fructose corn syrup that the feeding of such was the cause of CCD. Although both the notion and the way in which the “study” was run were preposterous, and were dismissed by all serious bee researchers, it nevertheless got a lot of press.
May 19, 2014
From: Bloomberg News (via HeraldOnline)
By Lisa Beyer
For activists eager to blame pesticides for the declining health of bees, researcher Chensheng Lu has offered what looks like valuable ammunition and the credibility provided by his affiliation with Harvard’s School of Public Health. Lu and his associates have just published a second study implicating a class of insecticides called neonicotinoids. What Lu’s research actually does, however, is distract attention from the need to limit more of the real causes of bee deaths.
May 16, 2014
From: The Daily Caller
Henry Miller/Fellow, Hoover Institution
On April 29, the European Commission failed for the second time to get the votes necessary to pass a proposed two-year ban on several innovative agricultural pesticides known as neonicotinoids (“neonics”). But immediately after reporting that a “qualified majority” of member states had not been reached, the Commission’s health and consumer affairs commissioner, Tonio Borg, announced that he would institute the ban administratively.
Such is the democratic process in the E.U., where the “precautionary principle” — ban or overregulate a product, process or activity, in the absence of complete assurance of safety — reigns.
May 15, 2014
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