Celebrate The Day Of The Honeybee By Banning Neonicotinoids

By Roy L Hales

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May 29 is the “Day of the Honeybee.” BC is celebrating the growth of an industry that started with the arrival of two hives in Victoria during 1858. There are now 47,000 colonies, whose activities a $250-million-a-year agricultural industry. BC also produces $10 million worth of honey. The provincial Minister of Agriculture, Norm Letnik, says this is a time to remember how much bees contribute to “our lives, our economy and our food supply.” Gwen Barlee suggests we should celebrate the Day of the Honeybee by Banning Neonicotinoids.

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Gwen Barlee, Policy Director with the Wilderness Committee

“The best way BC could honour our hard-working honey bees is to ban this extremely dangerous class of pesticides,” said Barlee, Policy Director with the Wilderness Committee. “Bees are responsible for one out of every three bites of food we eat, and we simply can’t play Russian roulette with these and other wild pollinators.”

According to a press release th WIlderness Committee issued today, “In the past couple of years, overwintering losses for honey bees in BC have ranged from 18 per cent to 27 per cent – well above normal winter mortality rates of 10 to 15 per cent. According to the BC Honey Producers Association, many producers in the Lower Mainland and Fraser Valley reported major losses in 2013, some reaching as high as 80 per cent.”

There have been other causes cited for colony collapse disorder.
Lux research Analyst Sara Olsen suggested the problem may be rooted in the industrialization of be keeping.

“Think of a bee as having an internal compass,” she said. “The beekeepers used to keep them on their property, where they knew their way around. Now the hives are rented out and bees are typically transported many miles to different locations. No wonder they are disoriented.”

Research from the University of Southampton indicates that pollutants found within diesel exhaust may limit a honeybees’ ability to recognize floral scents and hence partially contribute to colony collapse disorder.

Having failed to identify a single cause for colony collapse disorder, America’s Environmental Protection Agency has not taken any action.

Though Marla Spivak agrees that there are several causes of mortality, in a recent Ted Talk she pointed out that colony collapse disorder  appeared just after World War II. That’s when American farmers  stopped using cover crops, like clover and alfalfa, and adopted the use of synthetic fertilizers. Since then, there has been a more than 55% reduction in the number of honeybee hives. Spivak described the massive die-offs as the product of “a flowerless landscape and dysfunctional food system.”

pszczoła z rodzju apis na - Maciej Czyżewski, CC by SA 1.2, en Wikipedia
pszczoła z rodzju apis na – Maciej Czyżewski, CC by SA 1.2, en Wikipedia

An article in Mother Jones describes how researchers found “insecticides and fungicides in every hive, and herbicides in nearly a quarter. Putting aside the bees’ health for a moment, one way to read the results is as a survey of what farmers are spraying on some of the main fruit and vegetable crops we eat. Looking at it that way, it’s alarming that organophosphatesan insecticide class known to be a powerful neurotoxinwere found in 63.2 percent of the hives. Another nasty pesticide class, pyrethroids, showed up in every sample.”

In Ontario, where neonicotinoids are heavily used on corn and soy crops, honey bee losses in the winter of 2012/13 reached 37.9 per cent. After a massive bee kill in Ontario, which occurred after neonicotinoid-treated corn seeds were planted, research conducted by Health Canada found neonicotinoid residue in 80 per cent of the bee kill locations and on 75 per cent of the dead bees that were tested.

The European Food Safety Authority agree. They “identified a number of critical areas of concern” with neonicotinoids. There was “a high risk to bees, birds, mammals, aquatic organisms and soil-dwelling organisms … (that) could not be excluded on the basis of the available data. Given the importance of bees in the ecosystem and the food chain and given the multiple services they provide to humans, their protection is essential.” Consequently, in December 2013 the European Union suspended the use of neonicotinoid pesticides for two years.

“Honey bees are not the only pollinators that are vulnerable to this profoundly toxic pesticide,” said Barlee, “Bumble bees, hairy-belly bees, mining bees, sweat bees and hundreds of other wild bees in BC are also threatened by this poison, which is why we are asking Agriculture Minister Norm Letnick to not only to celebrate but actually protect our bees and wild pollinators.”

(Image at the top of the page: Gathering – Photo by Chris Gehlen CC by SA 2.0)

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