The same Spokane City Council that legalized the raising of small farm animals in March is now taking aim at protecting honeybees. Council President Ben Stuckart has introduced an ordinance that would ban city purchase and use of a relatively new class of insecticides known as neonicotinoids. Research is showing that those chemicals, sold as a series of products, may be harmful to honeybees.
Big Ag in California needs most of the U.S. bee supply transported to California to pollinate their almond crop, endangering the entire U.S. food system. 80% of the world's almonds come from California's Central Valley. Almonds are the #1 agricultural crop grown in California. It is a $4 billion industry. Big Ag in California needs almost 100% of the nation's bee supply transported to California this year to pollinate their almond crop, endangering the bee supply and the entire U.S. food system. Last year, many bees from northern climates arrived dead, forcing them to try and find bees as far away as Florida. Also, about 30% of the bees that went to California ended up dying according to one supplier. So the question we need to ask, and certainly one the USDA and FDA should be asking, is: Are we willing to risk our entire bee population on the California almond market?
Instead of getting rid of the pesticides that are killing the bees, the ag industry wants to create a big new market for high-fructose corn syrup. Since 2006, up to 40% of the bee colonies in the US have suffered Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) and neonicotinoid pesticides are to blame. Rather than the agriculture industry addressing the pesticide issue, they are now creating factory farmed bee hives, where the bees are fed sugar and high-fructose corn syrup instead of honey (both of which will contain GMOs). Studies of GMO grains on small mammals show that offspring become sterile by the third generation. What if all the bees were to suddenly stop reproducing?
California nearly lost its almond crop this year, due to a lack of bees. Once a year, in late winter, 1.5 million bee hives from around the country are delivered to these orchards where the bees’ pollination efforts take place over the course of just a few days. It’s the largest mass-pollination effort in the world. This year, however, the unthinkable happened. Many of the 6,000 orchard owners simply could not find enough bees to pollinate their almond trees, at any price. 80 percent of the world’s almonds come from California, and almonds are the number one agricultural product in California. A general consensus among beekeepers is that the bee die-offs are most definitely related to toxic chemicals. Increasingly, a systemic type of pesticide called neonicotinoids is being blamed for bee die-off’s. Neonicotinoids are now used on most of American crops, especially corn. This newer class of chemicals is applied to seeds before planting, allowing the pesticide to be taken up through the plant’s vascular system as it grows. As a result, the chemical is expressed in the pollen and nectar of the plant.
‘Entombed’ pollen is identified as having sunken, wax-covered cells amid ‘normal’, uncapped cells. Photograph: Journal of Invertebrate Pathology
by Fiona Harvey, environment correspondent
guardian.co.uk
Honeybees are taking emergency measures to protect their hives from pesticides, in an extraordinary example of the natural world adapting swiftly to our depredations, according to a prominent bee expert.
Scientists […]
by Tom Philpott.
Remember the case of the leaked document showing that the EPA’s own scientists are concerned about a pesticide it approved that might harm fragile honeybee populations?
Well, it turns that the EPA isn’t the only government agency whose researchers are worried about neonicotinoid pesticides. USDA researchers also have […]
