More On Bees And Pesticides

Elizabeth Kolbert on the recent studies linking Colony Collapse Disorder with neonicotinoids:

In a third study, to be published soon in the Bulletin of Insectology, seemingly healthy honey colonies were fed high-fructose corn syrup that had been treated with imidacloprid. Within six months, fifteen out of the sixteen hives that had been given the treated syrup were dead. In commercial beekeeping operations, bees are routinely fed corn syrup, and corn is routinely treated with neonicotinoids. “I believe one reason that commercial beekeepers are experiencing the most severe Colony Collapse Disorder is because of the link between high-fructose corn syrup and neonicotinoids,” said the lead author of the study, Chensheng Lu, a professor at Harvard. (Bayer CropScience, one of the world’s largest producers of neonicotinoids, has disputed Lu’s paper, as well as the other two.)

That damned high fructose corn syrup is always popping up as something bad for us.  But gosh, I don't figure that Mountain Dew with cane sugar is any better for us.  Now as for the pesticides:

“This more or less proves what we thought all along,” Hackenberg said of the three recent studies. He pointed me to a lawsuit that several beekeeping organizations filed in March against the Environmental Protection Agency. It charges that the E.P.A. violated its own rules by allowing clothianidin—yet another neonicotinoid—to be widely used despite the fact that the field studies the agency had ordered on the effects of the pesticide had never been performed. In a leaked memo from 2010, two E.P.A. staff members raised concerns about allowing mustard and cotton seed to be treated with clothianidin, noting that the field tests that had been completed had been deemed to be inadequate. “I think we’ve got a toxic mess,” Hackenberg told me. “I know we do.” Neonicotinoids, which were introduced in the nineteen-nineties, are neurotoxins that, as the name suggests, chemically resemble nicotine. They’re what are known as systemic pesticides: seeds are treated with the chemicals, which then are taken up by the vascular systems of the growing plants. According to the Pesticide Action Network, at least a hundred and forty million acres were planted with neonicotinoid-treated seeds in 2010. This is an area larger than California and Florida combined.

Hopefully it isn't as bad as these fears indicate. If it is, we farmers are in trouble.