Neonicotinoids cause bees to forage less and produce fewer offspring (Sep 10 2009)
British
environmental organizations are again demand a halt to the use of
neonicotinoid pesticides after a new report asserts the neonicotinoid
pesticide imidacloprid damages the health and life cycle of bees.
Buglife – The Invertebrate Conservation Trust – says
the unexplained collapse in Britain's bee population is being
exacerbated by a group of widely used systemic pesticides called neonicotinoids already banned in much of the European Union.
Buglife says the use of neonicotinoids is already
restricted for use in much of Europe including France and Germany after
beekeepers claimed the chemical was killing honey bees.
The Soil Association, says while this is unlikely to
explain Colony Collapse Disorder in the honey bee, it could be a key
contributory factor and may well be part of the cause for widespread
declines in wild bee populations.
The Buglife report also finds the process for approving
crop pesticides is inadequate for assessing risks to bees and other
wildlife.
The report was presented to Michael Jacobs, the
government’s special advisor on environmental issues at a bee summit in
London today (Wednesday).
Scientific evidence in the report shows that bees eating
nectar and pollen contaminated with imidacloprid (the commonest
neonicotinoid) then forage less and produce fewer offspring.
The current approvals process for pesticides assess
risks to non-target species and either attempts to reduce risk or
prevents use of high risk chemicals. However, Buglife says it is clear
from its study the process is inadequate regarding risks to bees as it
fails to properly test for a range of sub-lethal affects and potential
poisoning routes that are likely to affect bee populations in the UK
countryside.
Buglife, the Soil Association, Pesticides Action Network
and Bumblebee Conservation Trust are calling for the suspension of all
UK approvals for products containing neonicotinoids that are used
outdoors and a review of all neonicotinoid approvals.
In addition they are demanding more comprehensive
methodologies for assessing the effects pesticides on non-target
invertebrates are incorporated into approval procedures.
“Other countries have already introduced bans to prevent
neonicotinoids from harming bees,” Buglife CEO Matt Shardlow says.
“This is the most comprehensive review of the scientific evidence yet
and it has revealed the disturbing amount damage these poisons can
cause to bees.”
The entire report, 50+ pages, can be read at
http://www.buglife.org.uk/Resources/Buglife/Neonicotinoid%20insecticides%20report.pdf
Back to the Basics (9/3/09)
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The season is winding down. At this point, your hive should be
prepped for winter. You have checked your mite counts, and they are
low. You have checked for queen rightness and she is present. You have
harvested what you are comfortable taking and if necessary you have
fed, or are continuing to feed. Remember if you are mixing your own
sugar water, it is a 2:1 ratio of sugar to water for fall feeding. If
feeding, try mixing a little Honey-B-Healthy in the syrup. The largest commericial beekeeper told us that it saved his bees. That is quite an endorsement.
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Early reports suggest that this year will see the worst honey crop
in years. Typically, the nation's honey harvest is of no consequence to
most of us, the folks that have a handful of hives in the backyard.
However, what we can take from this is that the winter stores might be
low. At this point, I feel like I've beaten this subject over the head,
but what's one more time. Low honey stores can increase the chances of
robbing. To avoid this, be sure to reduce your entrance, don't leave
the hive open too long, While working a hive be aware of bees around
you for signs of the begin of robbing. Be sure to feed if the winter
stores are not sufficient. They need 60-80 pounds of honey or syrup. If
you feed, don't encourage robbing by spilling or leaving an upper
entrance open.
From:
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Brushy Mtn Bee Farm Sept E-Flier
First Find of AFB in South Africa (04/21/09)
By Alan Harman
American Foulbrood has been found in South Africa for the first time and authorities are mulling an eradication program. The disease, caused by the spore-forming bacterium Paenibacillus larvae, has never been previously reported in sub-Saharan Africa. Department of Agriculture plant health director Alice Baxter says AFB was found during a survey by the Plant Protection Research Institute (PPRI) of the Agricultural Research Council of honeybee colonies and retail honey in South Africa for the presence of the disease. Mike Allsopp, head of the Honeybee Research Section at the PPRIs Agricultural Research Center, became aware of the disease when a beekeeper experienced problems with unhealthy colonies. It was first thought to be European Foul Brood, which hit Western Cape apiaries last year, but tests at PPRI’s laboratory in Pretoria came up positive for AFB. Standard operating procedures for eradicating the disease is to burn the hive, including the bees, wax, frames and honey, and bury the ashes. Infected apiaries could face a quarantine of up to 18 months.
“The bad news is that AFB has now been found in some colonies and some apiaries in the Western Cape,” Baxter says. “The disease has been confirmed using all standard diagnostic tests, and the identification is considered to be entirely reliable.”
The Western Cape is a province in the southwest of the country. Its capital is Cape Town, the country’s main aviation hub. Until 1994, Western Cape was part of the huge Cape Province.
“At present it is not known how serious or extensive the disease outbreak is, but a precautionary approach requires that we consider there to be the potential for a full-scale AFB outbreak in South Africa, and to act accordingly,” Baxter says.
It’s not known how AFB entered South Africa. All imported honey and honeybee products are irradiated in a regime designed to block its entry and it’s thought untreated honey smuggled into the country could be the source. The Department of Agriculture has been conducting an urgent but extensive delimiting survey of the Western Cape to determine how widespread and extensive the AFB infection is, and particularly, whether it is present in the wild honeybee population.
“Once the extent and distribution of the AFB presence is known, the DoA in consultation with organized beekeeping and other stakeholders will decide on the appropriate course of action to be followed,” Baxter says. “This is likely to entail an attempt to quarantine and eradicate the disease.”
In the interim, beekeepers are strongly urged to adapt extreme precautionary measures so as to not spread the disease further, and to prevent their apiaries from contracting the disease. This applies to all beekeepers in South Africa, but particularly those in the Western Cape. They have been advised to keep all apiaries distinct from each other and not move honeybee colonies from apiary to apiary; not to place colonies in the near proximity of colonies belonging to other beekeepers; not to move equipment (brood boxes, supers, frames) from apiary to apiary, or from colony to colony; to sterilize all beekeeping equipment (hive tools, gloves) with alcohol or boiling water after use; not to put out wet supers for bees to feed from; not to feed colonies with anything containing honey or pollen; keep robbing to an absolute minimum, and hence, keep beekeeping management to a minimum. Beekeepers are being urged to contact Allsopp if they consider their colonies either infected with AFB or have shown any symptoms in the past six months. Allsopp tells Bee Culture he is trying to complete a scientific report on the outbreak before the end of this month.
“So far it is only in the Western Cape, but already spread over some 200 kilometers (125 miles), and in at least four or five commercial beekeeping operations,” he says.
“No decision yet on the course of action to be taken, but we should know quite soon.”
Allsopp says antibiotics are unlikely to be an option.
“A couple of beekeepers want to use them, but I don't think it is an option that is being seriously considered,” he says. “All advice that we have received (including from the U.S.) is for us to not go that route.”From
(Kim@BeeCulture.com)
Pesticides on Chinese Vegetables (04/17/09)
theepochtimes.com
Greenpeace China recently conducted a survey on vegetables sold in China's large cities such as Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou. The organization found many pesticide-ridden vegetables; some of them even carry cocktails of many highly poisonous pesticides.
In the Greenpeace China report titled, “Pesticide Cocktails: Have You Drunk Some Today?” the organization said that residents in Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou almost drink a cup of pesticide cocktail from their fruits and veggies every day. Among the pesticides found, five of them cause cancer. The report also shows that 89 percent of the samples found in these three major cities have pesticide residues; 20 percent contain illegal and highly poisonous pesticides; 60 percent have residues of at least five kinds of pesticides.
A commodity inspection official in Guangdong province said that the abuse of pesticides increased in recent years. “Farmers did not know much about pesticides eight or ten years ago. In recent years, the farmers started to focus more on economic returns and the appearance of the produce and apply pesticides heavily. Now the farmers don’t eat what they grow, they eat vegetables that require very little pesticide.”
Gao Dawei, a former professor of South China University of Technology who specializes in food additive chemicals, said that residues of multiple pesticides are more harmful to the human body than a single pesticide. “It’s a ‘synergetic effect’ as we call it in chemistry. A single chemical may not have much effect but several of them mixed together, cause the chemical reactions to amplify the effect. Most ingested poisons in the human body have such a kind of synergetic effect and hence a cocktail of poisons may cause more serious damage than a single one.”
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However, Beijing published an official survey recently that states that 96 percent of vegetables in the city conform to national standards. According to a report in Beijing Daily on April 3, the Produce Safety Inspection Division of the Standing Committee of the Beijing People’s Congress announced that 96.75 percent of vegetables in Beijing passed safety inspections in 2008.
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Gao, a commodity inspection official in Guangdong said that official inspections most of the time are not reliable because of the complex interests between the producers and inspectors. Gao said that China has very detailed regulations on produce pesticide residue but in reality they are not enforced.
“The (Chinese) standards were developed from international standards and are even stricter. However, when pests became (pesticide) resistant, the farmers must apply higher dosages. Natural disasters from pests have been getting worse these years and farmers will not have crops if they don’t use a lot of pesticides,” said Gao.
To deal with the residues, Chinese people often choose to prolong the time of soaking and washing their produce. However, some pesticides cannot be cleaned this way according to Gao. “Water can only remove general water-soluble pesticides on the surface. I know at least two kinds of pesticides that can not be washed away. One of them is the acidic pesticides. They react with the produce and bind tightly to it. That is why approved detergents for vegetable cleaning often contain a little alkali. The other kind can permeate into the cells of the produce and nothing can wash it away.”
HEALTHY EATING, HEALTHY BEES (04/09/09)
WASHINGTON, April 9, 2009 – Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack joined First Lady Michelle Obama and a group of 5th graders on the South Lawn of the White House today to talk about healthy eating, the availability of locally grown fruits and vegetables, and bees.
“Growing your own fruits and vegetables is one of the best ways to have healthy food,” Vilsack said. “Working in a garden is a great way to stay physically active and maintain a healthy body. And the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) is helping schools make sure that every student in America has a healthy and nutritious lunch to eat at school.”
This July, USDA will be providing two types of parasite-resistant honey bees developed by USDA scientists to pollinate the plants in the new White House garden this summer. Both of these bees are rapidly gaining in popularity with bee keepers.
Honey bees enhance any garden, because they increase the yields of plants that require pollination, they produce honey, and they are one of Nature's most fascinating creatures to observe. Unfortunately, parasitic mites cause serious health problems for most varieties of honey bees, and many beekeepers must use pesticides to combat the mites in the hives. But the USDA-developed bees are mite-resistant, offering a more natural, organic alternative for the White House garden.
Honey bees are crucial to American agriculture, adding some $15 billion in value in the nation's crops, particularly specialty crops such as almonds and other nuts, berries, fruits, and vegetables. In California, the almond crop alone uses 1.3 million colonies of bees, approximately one half of all honey bees in the United States, and this need is projected to grow to 1.5 million colonies by 2010.
Scientists with the Agricultural Research Service (ARS), USDA's principal intramural scientific research agency, developed the two types of mite-resistant honey bees. One type is highly resistant to the parasitic mite Varroa destructor, commonly known as the varroa mite. The bees have a trait called "varroa-sensitive hygiene" which prompts the worker bees to detect and remove infested bees from the nest, eliminating the need for chemical help to control the mites.
The second type of mite-resistant honey bees is based on a strain of honey bees from Russia which are naturally resistant not only to varroa mites, but also to tracheal mites, which infest the breathing tubes of the bees. These bees are also highly tolerant of cold weather and require less artificial feeding than typical honey bees.
The Russian bees were brought to the United States by Thomas Rinderer, research leader at ARS' Honey Bee Breeding, Genetics and Physiology Research Unit at Baton Rouge, La., where studies have been under way on the bees since the mid-1990s. Rinderer and other ARS scientists will collaborate with White House staff on installation of the USDA bees in the White House garden.
For the past eight years, breeder queens of the Russian-derived and varroa-sensitive hygienic bees have been released to the beekeeping industry. In 2008, a breeders' group called the Russian Honeybee Breeders Association, Inc., was formed to supply the Russian-derived queens throughout the U.S. beekeeping industry, and demand is outstripping supply.
Both types of mite-resistant USDA bees are good pollinators and easy to keep alive because of their hardiness, thus helping ensure the success of the new White House garden.
Chinese Insurers Dumped On (04/08/09)
Special to Bee Culture by Alan Harman Five American food product producers file a $1-billion lawsuit seeking class-action status against a handful of major insurance companies and the U.S. government for alleged damages caused by dumped Chinese food products.
The five producers are Sioux Honey Association, Adee Honey Farms, Monterey Mushrooms Inc., The Garlic Co. and Beaucoup Crawfish of Eunice Inc.
The Dow Jones news service reports the complaint alleges the insurers’ negligent issuance of customs surety bonds, and the subsequent refusal to pay under the bonds, allowed the sale of “huge amounts of competing food imports” from China at below cost, or “dumped” prices.
“The dumping of these imports forced the domestic producers to significantly lower the prices for their competing products, causing the producers to lose hundreds of millions of dollars,” lawyer Michael Coursey of Kelly Drye & Warren LLP tells the new service. The company is representing the producers.
Customs bonds, required on all commercial imports entering the U.S., are contracts used for guaranteeing a specific obligation will be fulfilled between customs and an importer for any given import transaction.
The complaint alleges that for eight years, the insurers negligently issued hundreds of customs surety bonds that guaranteed the payment of any dumping duties the government might determine were owed by U.S. importers for the specified Chinese goods.
The lawsuit also claims the U.S. Customs and Border Protection and the Commerce Department failed to enforce four antidumping orders issued to protect domestic producers from dumped Chinese imports.
The defendants include Hartford Financial Services Group Inc., Kingsway Financial Services Inc. unit Lincoln General Insurance Co., Swiss Reinsurance Co. Washington International Insurance Co. and American International Group Inc. unit American Home Assurance.
AIA Takes Survey, Again. (04/07/09)
Apiary Inspectors take annual survey, again. But Hurry.
What happened to the APHIS survey that was supposed to be funded? Or is this it?Maybe this year they won’t miss the colonies buried in the snow up north, eh?The Apiary Inspectors of America (AIA) and the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) have asked that we fill out the following questionnaire. The information you provide will be entered into a spreadsheet and will not be attached to your name or address in any way. In addition to this e-mail survey, you may be contacted by phone and asked the same questions. Please provide answers to both if you are asked to do so – but mention to the phone interviewer that you have already answered the questions via email.
The results of this survey will be compiled and published so that everyone can see how bees are doing in the United States. These results, along with those from the past two years, will be used to secure research funding and assistance for Bee health. You can see the full report of losses over the winter of 2006-2007 as published in the ABJ at
http://maarec.cas.psu.edu/CCDPpt/CCDJuly07ABJArticle-1.pdf and the losses from 2007-2008 at http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0004071Please complete the survey below. The survey will be conducted between March 30 and April 17 2009. If possible pass along this message to your association members, other beekeepers you know or put on your web page or in your newsletter. The more information the better.
1. In what state(s) and county(s) do you keep your hives? If you keep hives in more than one state or county, please answer questions 2-9 separately by location.
2. How many hives did you have alive in September 2008?
3. How many hives are alive now (March/April 2009)?
4. How many splits, increases, and/or colonies did you make/buy since September 2008?
5. What percentage of loss, over this time period, would you consider acceptable?
6. What percentage of your hives that died had no dead bees in the hive or in the apiary?
7. To what do you attribute the cause of death for the hives that died?
8. What percentage of your hives did you send to CA for almond pollination?
9. How many times, on average, did you move your colonies last year?