One way already documented to kill honeybees is to poison them with commercial pesticides and kill them but another way is when pesticides interfere with the honeybee's ability to fly. (Science Daily: Common pesticide damages honey bees' ability to fly)
A honey bee (Apis mellifera) is harnessed for study on a flight mill in biology professor James Nieh’s laboratory, UC San Diego.
Credit: Simone Tosi, UC San Diego
Biologists at the University of California San Diego have demonstrated for the first time that a widely used pesticide can significantly impair the ability of otherwise healthy honey bees to fly, raising concerns about how pesticides affect their capacity to pollinate and the long-term effects on the health of honey bee colonies.
- SD
There's no good spin to it. Commercial pesticides have got honeybees screwed coming and going.
Previous research has shown that foraging honey bees that ingested neonicotinoid pesticides, crop insecticides that are commonly used in agriculture, were less likely to return to their home nest, leading to a decrease in foragers.
A study published April 26 in Scientific Reports by UC San Diego postdoctoral researcher Simone Tosi, Biology Professor James Nieh, along with Associate Professor Giovanni Burgio of the University of Bologna, Italy, describes in detail how the neonicotinoid pesticide thiamethoxam damages honey bees. Thiamethoxam is used in crops such as corn, soybeans and cotton. To test the hypothesis that the pesticide impairs flight ability, the researchers designed and constructed a flight mill (a bee flight-testing instrument) from scratch. This allowed them to fly bees under consistent and controlled conditions.
- SD
Months of testing and data acquisition revealed that typical levels of neonicotinoid exposure, which bees could experience when foraging on agricultural crops -- but below lethal levels -- resulted in substantial damage to the honey bee's ability to fly.
"Our results provide the first demonstration that field-realistic exposure to this pesticide alone, in otherwise healthy colonies, can alter the ability of bees to fly, specifically impairing flight distance, duration and velocity" said Tosi. "Honey bee survival depends on its ability to fly, because that's the only way they can collect food. Their flight ability is also crucial to guarantee crop and wild plant pollination."
- SD
Neonicotinoid insecticides are neurotoxic and used around the world on broad varieties of crops, including common fruits and vegetables, through spray, soil and seed applications. Evidence of these insecticides has been found in the nectar, pollen and water that honey bees collect.
- SD
The researchers make no statement on what needs to be done but isn't it obvious.
The situation needs a Rachel Carson to present in such a way that people really get it. Carson gave us "The Silent Spring" and she changed America's approach to DDT, etc. Now we need "The Silent Summer" to describe the consequence of the loss of the honeybees and that story won't involve any ludicrous fantasies of replacing honeybees with robo pollinators.
A honey bee (Apis mellifera) is harnessed for study on a flight mill in biology professor James Nieh’s laboratory, UC San Diego.
Credit: Simone Tosi, UC San Diego
Biologists at the University of California San Diego have demonstrated for the first time that a widely used pesticide can significantly impair the ability of otherwise healthy honey bees to fly, raising concerns about how pesticides affect their capacity to pollinate and the long-term effects on the health of honey bee colonies.
- SD
There's no good spin to it. Commercial pesticides have got honeybees screwed coming and going.
Previous research has shown that foraging honey bees that ingested neonicotinoid pesticides, crop insecticides that are commonly used in agriculture, were less likely to return to their home nest, leading to a decrease in foragers.
A study published April 26 in Scientific Reports by UC San Diego postdoctoral researcher Simone Tosi, Biology Professor James Nieh, along with Associate Professor Giovanni Burgio of the University of Bologna, Italy, describes in detail how the neonicotinoid pesticide thiamethoxam damages honey bees. Thiamethoxam is used in crops such as corn, soybeans and cotton. To test the hypothesis that the pesticide impairs flight ability, the researchers designed and constructed a flight mill (a bee flight-testing instrument) from scratch. This allowed them to fly bees under consistent and controlled conditions.
- SD
Months of testing and data acquisition revealed that typical levels of neonicotinoid exposure, which bees could experience when foraging on agricultural crops -- but below lethal levels -- resulted in substantial damage to the honey bee's ability to fly.
"Our results provide the first demonstration that field-realistic exposure to this pesticide alone, in otherwise healthy colonies, can alter the ability of bees to fly, specifically impairing flight distance, duration and velocity" said Tosi. "Honey bee survival depends on its ability to fly, because that's the only way they can collect food. Their flight ability is also crucial to guarantee crop and wild plant pollination."
- SD
Neonicotinoid insecticides are neurotoxic and used around the world on broad varieties of crops, including common fruits and vegetables, through spray, soil and seed applications. Evidence of these insecticides has been found in the nectar, pollen and water that honey bees collect.
- SD
The researchers make no statement on what needs to be done but isn't it obvious.
The situation needs a Rachel Carson to present in such a way that people really get it. Carson gave us "The Silent Spring" and she changed America's approach to DDT, etc. Now we need "The Silent Summer" to describe the consequence of the loss of the honeybees and that story won't involve any ludicrous fantasies of replacing honeybees with robo pollinators.
No comments:
Post a Comment