Saturday, May 10, 2014

World's No. 1 pesticide brings honeybees to their knees, say scientists...

A team of Harvard biologists has come closer to cracking the mystery of honeybee Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD), eight years after its appearance.

CCD persists in transforming bee colonies around the world into ghost towns: by the end of each winter, some colonies wind up littered with dead bees and emptied of many more, with no signs of renewal.

"One of the defining symptomatic observations of CCD colonies is the emptiness of hives in which the amount of dead bees found inside the hives do not account for the total numbers of bees present prior to winter when they were alive," states the report, published May 9 in the Bulletin of Insectology.

The exact mechanism behind these collapses remains dauntingly unclear, but they have been linked with pathogen infestation, malnutrition, and pesticide exposure. This week's report strongly indicates that two neonicotinoid insecticides that are widely used on crops can decimate honeybee colonies' winter survival rates, whether or not mites or parasites are present.

The two chemicals, imidacloprid and clothianidin, both block insects' central nervous systems, killing them by paralysis. Imidacloprid is the world's most widely-used insecticide, and has been registered for use in the US since the 1994; clothianidin was registered in 2003 by the US Environmental Protection Agency, which found that it had passed honeybee-specific toxicity tests. Full story...

Related posts:
  1. What's happening to honey bees?
  2. Bee deaths: EU, Switzerland to suspend use of pesticides...
  3. Greenpeace targets Syngenta on bee deaths...
  4. Death of the birds and the bees across America...
  5. Bayer and Monsanto linked to declining bee population...
  6. Pesticides killing 60 per cent of honeybees...
  7. New film blames Bayer for plight of honey bees...

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