Are Pesticides Pushing Honeybee Die-offs Past the Tipping Point

“We are inch­ing our way toward a crit­i­cal tip­ping point,” said Steve Ellis, sec­re­tary of the National Honey Bee Advisory Board (NHBAB) and a bee­keeper for 35 years. Last year he had so many abnor­mal bee die-offs that he’ll qual­ify for dis­as­ter relief from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA).

In addi­tion to con­tin­ued reports of CCD — a still some­what mys­te­ri­ous phe­nom­e­non in which entire bee colonies lit­er­ally dis­ap­pear, alien-abduction style, leav­ing not even their dead bod­ies behind — bee pop­u­la­tions are suf­fer­ing poor health in gen­eral, and expe­ri­enc­ing shorter life spans and dimin­ished vital­ity. And while par­a­sites, pathogens, and habi­tat loss can deal blows to bee health, research increas­ingly points to pes­ti­cides as the pri­mary culprit.

“In the indus­try we believe pes­ti­cides play an impor­tant role in what’s going on,” said Dave Hackenberg, co-chair of the NHBAB and a bee­keeper in Pennsylvania.

Of par­tic­u­lar con­cern is a group of pes­ti­cides, chem­i­cally sim­i­lar to nico­tine, called neon­i­coti­noids (neon­ics for short), and one in par­tic­u­lar called cloth­i­an­i­din. Instead of being sprayed, neon­ics are used to treat seeds, so that they’re absorbed by the plant’s vas­cu­lar sys­tem, and then end up attack­ing the cen­tral ner­vous sys­tems of bees that come to col­lect pollen. Virtually all of today’s genet­i­cally engi­neered Bt corn is treated with neon­ics.

The chem­i­cal indus­try alleges that bees don’t like to col­lect corn pollen, but new research shows that not only do bees indeed for­age in corn, but they also have mul­ti­ple other routes of expo­sure to neonics.

The Purdue University study, pub­lished in the jour­nal PLoS ONE, found high lev­els of cloth­i­an­i­din in planter exhaust spewed dur­ing the spring sow­ing of treated maize seed. It also found neon­ics in the soil of unplanted fields nearby those planted with Bt corn, on dan­de­lions grow­ing near those fields, in dead bees found near hive entrances, and in pollen stored in the hives.

Evidence already pointed to the pres­ence of neonic-contaminated pollen as a fac­tor in CCD. As Hackenberg explained, “The insects start tak­ing [the pes­ti­cide] home, and it con­t­a­m­i­nates every­where the insect came from.” These new rev­e­la­tions about the per­va­sive­ness of neon­ics in bees’ habi­tats only strengthen the case against using the insecticides.

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