Collapse in Global Bee Population Major Threat to Crops

Leaked Document: EPA Knowingly Approved Bee-killing Pesticide

January 5, 2011

Natural News - A Colorado beekeeper recently obtained a leaked document revealing that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) knows a popular crop pesticide is killing off honey bees, but has allowed its continued approval anyway.

Despite opposition from its own scientists, EPA officials first gave the a-okay to Bayer CropScience's toxic pesticide clothianidin in 1993 based on the company's own flawed safety studies. But now it has been revealed that the EPA knew all along about the dangers of clothianidin and decided to just ignore them.

By now, most people know that honeybees are dying off at an incredibly disturbing rate. Colony collapse disorder (CCD), a condition where bees stray from the hive and never find their way back, is nixing millions of nature's pollinators every year. Previous studies have pinpointed various environmental toxins as the primary culprits, including toxic pesticides like clothianidin (http://www.naturalnews.com/028429_c...).

And the leaked document, which was written by the EPA's Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention, explains clearly that

"[c]lothianidin's major risk concern is to nontarget insects (honey bees)" and that "[a]cute toxicity studies to honey bees show that clothianidin is highly toxic on both a contact and an oral basis."

The letter was in response to a request from Bayer to have clothianidin approval expanded for use on cotton and mustard in addition to its other approved uses.

So if clothianidin poses a significant threat against honey bees, and the EPA has known about this all along, why was it ever approved in the first place? And if Bayer's original safety studies have been shown to be contradictory to actual science, why has the EPA failed to go after Bayer for falsifying safety data? Apparently those who make the final decisions at the EPA have no actual interest in the truth and would rather cater to corporate interests at the expense of public health.

Several European nations have outlawed the use of clothianidin, including Germany, Francy, Italy and Slovenia. U.S. growers of conventional crops, however, continue to use the dangerous chemical thanks to corrupt EPA officials.

And when all the honey bees die and there are no pollinators left to grow food, these same EPA officials will be responsible for the mass murder of millions of people.

U.S. Sees Massive Drop in Bumble Bees: Study

January 4, 2011

AFP – Weakened by inbreeding and disease, bumble bees have died off at an astonishing rate over the past 20 years, with some US populations diving more than 90 percent, according to a new study.

The findings are of concern because bees play a crucial role in pollinating crops such as tomatoes, peppers and berries, said the findings of a three-year study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

Similar declines have also been seen in Europe and Asia, said Sydney Cameron, of the Department of Entomology and Institute for Genomic Biology at the University of Illinois, the main author of the study.

"The decline of bumble bees in the US is associated with two things we were able to study: the pathogen Nosema bombi and a decline in genetic diversity. But we are not saying Nosema is the cause. We don't know," said Cameron.

"It's just an association. There may be other causes."

He added that the decline is "huge and recent," having taken place in the last two decades.

Nosema bombi is a bee pathogen that has also afflicted European bumble bees.

Researchers examined eight species of North American bumble bees and found that the "relative abundance of four species has dropped by more than 90 percent, suggesting die-offs further supported by shrinking geographic ranges," said the study.

"Compared with species of relatively stable population sizes, the dwindling bee species had low genetic diversity, potentially rendering them prone to pathogens and environmental pressures."

Their cousins, the honey bees, have also experienced catastrophic die-offs since 2006 in a phenomenon known as "colony collapse disorder," though the causes have yet to be fully determined.

Bumble bees also make honey, but it is used to feed the colony, not farmed for human consumption.

They are however raised in Europe for pollinating greenhouse vegetables in a multi-billion-dollar industry that has more recently taken off in Japan and Israel and is being developed in Mexico and China, Cameron said.

"We need to start to develop other bees for pollination beside honey bees, because they are suffering enormously," he added.

There are around 250 species of bumble bee, including 50 in the United States alone.

Collapse in Global Bee Population Major Threat to Crops

Disease and inbreeding might have caused US bumblebee decline over the past few decades say scientists. Bumblebees are important pollinators of wild plants and agricultural crops around the world.

January 3, 2011

guardian.co.uk - The abundance of four common species of bumblebees in the US has dropped by 96% in just the past few decades, according to the most comprehensive national census of the insects. Scientists said the alarming decline, which could have devastating implications for the pollination of both wild and farmed plants, was likely to be a result of disease and inbreeding.

Bumble bees are important pollinators of wild plants and agricultural crops around the world including tomatoes and berries thanks to their large body size, long tongues, and high-frequency buzzing, which helps release pollen from flowers.

Bees in general pollinate some 90% of the world's commercial plants, including most fruits, vegetables and nuts. Coffee, soya beans and cotton are all dependent on pollination by bees to increase yields. It is the start of a food chain that also sustains wild birds and animals.

But the insects, along with other crucial pollinators such as moths and hoverflies, have been in serious decline around the world since the last few decades of the 20th century. It is unclear why, but scientists think it is from a combination of new diseases, changing habitats around cities, and increasing use of pesticides.

Sydney Cameron, an entomologist at the University of Illinois, led a team on a three-year study of the changing distribution, genetic diversity and pathogens in eight species of bumblebees in the US.

By comparing his results with those in museum records of bee populations, he showed that the relative abundance of four of the sampled species (Bombus occidentalis, B pensylvanicus, B affinis and B terricola) had declined by up to 96% and that their geographic ranges had contracted by 23% to 87%, some within just the past two decades.

Cameron's findings reflect similar studies across the world. According to the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology in the UK, three of the 25 British species of bumblebees are already extinct and half of the remainder have shown serious declines, often up to 70%, since around the 1970s. Last year, scientists inaugurated a £10m programme, called the Insect Pollinators Initiative, to look at the reasons behind the devastation in the insect population.

Cameron's team also showed that declining species of bees had higher infection levels of a pathogen called Nosema bombi and lower genetic diversity compared with the four species of bees that were not in decline – B bifarius, B vosnesenskii, B impatiens and B bimaculatus.

The N bombi pathogen is commonly found in bumblebees throughout Europe but until now has been largely unstudied in North America. The infection reduces the lifespans of individual bees and also results in smaller colony sizes.

The reduction in genetic diversity seen in the declining bees means that they are less able to fight off any new pathogens or resist pollution or predators.

"Higher pathogen prevalence and reduced genetic diversity are, thus, realistic predictors of these alarming patterns of decline in north America, although cause and effect remain uncertain," Cameron wrote today in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Insects such as bees, moths and hoverflies pollinate around a third of the agricultural crops grown worldwide. If all of the UK's insect pollinators were wiped out, the drop in crop production would cost the UK economy up to £440m a year, equivalent to around 13% of the UK's income from farming.

The collapse in the global bee population is a major threat to crops.

It is estimated that a third of everything we eat depends upon pollination by bees, which means they contribute some £26bn to the global economy. Other identified causes of bee decline include parasites such as the bloodsucking varroa mite and viral and bacterial infections, pesticides and poor nutrition stemming from intensive farming methods.

"Pollinator decline has become a worldwide issue, raising increasing concerns over impacts on global food production, stability of pollination services, and disruption of plant-pollinator networks," wrote Cameron. "In accordance with the goals of the United Nations convention on biological diversity to reduce the rate of species loss by 2010, such efforts to elucidate the causes and ecological impacts of bumble bee decline, in co-ordination with informed conservation strategies, will go a long way to mitigating further losses."