Natural Cures Not Medicine: bee die-offs

Most Read This Week:

Showing posts with label bee die-offs. Show all posts
Showing posts with label bee die-offs. Show all posts

As Bee Death Toll Skyrockets, Media Forced to Cover Neonicotinoid Pesticides

Natural Cures Not Medicine on Facebook: www.facebook.com/naturalcuresnotmedicine

A study published June 14th 2013, in the Journal of Applied Ecology sheds some much needed light on the severe implications of neonicotinoid insecticides. Neonicotinoid insecticides are applied to the seeds of target crops and grow with the plant which make them systemic within these crops, travelling through all the tissues of the plant. This makes them highly effective at killing insects, which in turn makes them the most widely used pesticides in the world.

The use of neonicotinoids is entirely contradictory to the sustainable farming method of integrated pest management (IPM). Also when comparing the cost of application to the benefit provided, the cost of the insecticide is often found to exceed that of actual crop yield. The author of the study, Prof Dave Goulson, says: “Studies from the US suggest that neonicotinoid seed dressings may be either entirely ineffective or cost more than the benefit in crop yield gained from their use. We seem to be in a situation where farmers are advised primarily by agronomists involved in selling them pesticides.”

New findings show that neonicotinoids persist and accumulate in the soil longer than originally findings have shown. Being systemic they are also in the pollen and nectar of treated plants, which provides for their unintended spreading and harm as the concentrations are sufficient to substantially impact colony reproduction in bumblebees. Only 20% of the applied chemical remains with the seed, the other 80% is lost during sowing in the air and soil. The aerial dust alone, that results from sowing seeds, has shown to cause
direct mortality in nearby flying honeybees.

The impact of pesticides on honeybees has taken such a toll that even the mainstream media is now forced to cover it.


Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

by Matt Agorist, RealFarmacy.com

Source: realfarmacy.com

Study: Pesticides Are Leading Cause of Bee Die-Offs

Natural Cures Not Medicine on Facebook: www.facebook.com/naturalcuresnotmedicine

As we’ve written before, the mysterious mass die-off of honey bees that pollinate $30 billion worth of crops in the US has so decimated America’s apis mellifera population that one bad winter could leave fallow. Now, a new study has pinpointed some of the probable causes of bee deaths and the rather scary results show that averting beemageddon will be much more difficult than previously thought.
Photo: Ben Margot
Scientists had struggled to find the trigger for so-called Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) that has wiped out an estimated 10 million beehives, worth $2 billion, over the past six years. Suspects have included pesticides, disease-bearing parasites and poor nutrition. But in a first-of-its-kind study published today in the journal PLOS, scientists at the University of Maryland and the US Department of Agriculture have identified a witch’s brew of pesticides and fungicides contaminating pollen that bees collect to feed their hives. The findings break new ground on why large numbers of bees are dying though they do not identify the specific cause of CCD, where an entire beehive dies at once.

When researchers collected pollen from hives on the east coast pollinating cranberry, watermelon and other crops and fed it to healthy bees, those bees showed a significant decline in their ability to resist infection by a parasite called Nosema ceranae. The parasite has been implicated in Colony Collapse Disorder though scientists took pains to point out that their findings do not directly link the pesticides to CCD. The pollen was contaminated on average with nine different pesticides and fungicides though scientists discovered 21 agricultural chemicals in one sample. Scientists identified eight ag chemicals associated with increased risk of infection by the parasite.

Most disturbing, bees that ate pollen contaminated with fungicides were three times as likely to be infected by the parasite. Widely used, fungicides had been thought to be harmless for bees as they’re designed to kill fungus, not insects, on crops like apples.

“There’s growing evidence that fungicides may be affecting the bees on their own and I think what it highlights is a need to reassess how we label these agricultural chemicals,” Dennis VanEngelsdorp, the study’s lead author, told Quartz.

Labels on pesticides warn farmers not to spray when pollinating bees are in the vicinity but such precautions have not applied to fungicides.

Bee populations are so low in the US that it now takes 60% of the country’s surviving colonies just to pollinate one California crop, almonds. And that’s not just a west coast problem—California supplies 80% of the world’s almonds, a market worth $4 billion.

In recent years, a class of chemicals called neonicotinoids has been linked to bee deaths and in April regulators banned the use of the pesticide for two years in Europe where bee populations have also plummeted. But VanEngelsdorp, an assistant research scientist at the University of Maryland, says the new study shows that the interaction of multiple pesticides is affecting bee health
.
“The pesticide issue in itself is much more complex than we have led to be believe,” he says. “It’s a lot more complicated than just one product, which means of course the solution does not lie in just banning one class of product.”

The study found another complication in efforts to save the bees: US honey bees, which are descendants of European bees, do not bring home pollen from native North American crops but collect bee chow from nearby weeds and wildflowers. That pollen, however, was also contaminated with pesticides even though those plants were not the target of spraying.

“It’s not clear whether the pesticides are drifting over to those plants but we need take a new look at agricultural spraying practices,” says VanEngelsdorp.

Sources: Raw For Beauty
qz.com

Disclaimer:

Before trying anything you find on the internet you should fully investigate your options and get further advice from professionals.

Below are our most recent posts on facebook