UPDATE 3/14/09 - The Greenwich Post newspaper reported in 2008 that McNitt’s honey testing “found no trace of another insecticide called Imidacloprid“… Jim McNitt commented on my first post, however, that Eliza just won again this year two top Life Science prizes at the 2009 Connecticut Science Fair for her continued research on pesticides in honey (read his blog). Most notably, he writes that she in fact did find imidacloprid in her testing. “This year, Eliza used HPLC to examine pollen, beeswax, beebread and dead bees gathered from the Arboretum hive for traces of imidacloprid… Her work confirmed the presence of high levels of imidacloprid both in the hive and on the extremities of the Arboretum honey bees.” So, what’s the story behind the story, here? Why did the newspaper report the contrary? Did last year’s research methods differ from this year’s? Was there a sudden spike in imidacloprid usage near the Arboretum study location in the past year? Stamford, CT is a place of wealth and immaculate lawns. It would be nice to see a survey of the gardeners and home owners about what products they put on the lawns. Do they use any of those recently banned in Canada? Would the local garden supply shops provide stats on sales of certain products for local research purposes? Mr. McNitt says’s he’ll send me the link to her research PDF for us to post here. I can’t wait. Thanks for keeping us posted. [his response and link is here : McNitt 2008 Research.pdf] (Photo by Frank LaBanca)

• What are the possibilities of other high school students around the country sending samples to Greenwich High School for testing?
  
• Could there be a continuing research program set up there?
  
• What are the costs to the school for conducting the tests?
  
• Is it complicated to test using High Performance Liquid Chromatography (HPLC) technology?

Looks to me like future students at Greenwich High could expand on McNitt’s research and follow in her award-winning footsteps. They have a great research location, ability to survey properties within a 4 mile radius of the hives and perhaps even discover and map the places where the bees are picking up imidacloprid, down to the product name. The next test in the Greenwich High School CCD Research Program should be of the water supply, an often overlooked source of contamination - bees drink water and use it to cool the hive! Science teacher Andy Bramante may need some TA’s, too. - DNR

http://www.jimmcnitt.com/Site2/Blog/Entries/2009/3/13_And_the_winner_of_the_2009_Connecticut_Science_Fair_Is…..html

———————

3/13/09 - Just yesterday I posted some 2008 news about this young woman, and today I see she’s more scientist researcher than film maker! If there’s any high school that would have its own advanced Spectroscopy and Chromatography technology, it would be Greenwich High School. Lucky girl. I’m waiting for Eliza to send me the link to her research (use comment)… Congratulations! You deserve a full ride to college. (Stick with the hard sciences ;)) -DNR

Mar 12, 2008
Greenwich High student wins science competition
http://www.acorn-online.com

Eliza McNitt, a Greenwich High School junior, captured top honors at the 45th Connecticut Junior Science and Humanities Symposium for an original research project that traced the migration of pesticides through the production of southwestern Connecticut honey.

In addition to a $1,000 scholarship and letter of recognition from Gov. M. Jodi Rell, McNitt will represent Connecticut at the National Junior Science and Humanities Symposium at Orlando, FL, in May. The symposium program is sponsored by the U.S. Army, Navy and Air Force in an effort to encourage original scientific research at the high school level. Courtney Fogwell, a GHS senior, was selected as a National Symposium alternate for her project analyzing the environmental impact of artificial-turf playing fields.

Eliza and Courtney were among 13 state finalists who made oral presentations before an audience of more than 300 fellow science students, parents, teachers, and jurors at the University of Connecticut in Storrs on March 10. Both students were mentored by GHS science teacher Andrew Bramante.

“While extensive work has been done on the presence of residual insecticides on fruits and vegetables, there has been little significant scientific research on residual pesticides in honey,” Mr. Bramante said in a release. “Eliza came to me with her project on the first day of class. I almost fell off my stool when I heard it.”

Eliza says that the topic was indirectly inspired by her grandfather, a chemical engineer, who is fastidious about washing and peeling fresh produce.

“If there are insecticides on an apple,” Eliza said. “It made me wonder if they could also be present in honey.”

She found an ideal controlled research environment at the Bartlett Arboretum in Stamford, which maintains an apiary in the middle of its 30 acre property. James Kaechele, arboretum education director and beekeeping specialist Andrew Cote´ made honey samples available along with detailed records of pesticide applications.

Eliza tested the arboretum honey using advanced Spectroscopy and Chromatography technology that had been donated to the GHS science program.

“I was incredibly fortunate to able to perform my own analysis,” she says. “GHS has equipment that you can’t even find in most colleges.”

Her tests revealed the presence of a component of the pesticide Neem Oil — which is widely used in organic farming. Neem Oil is made from the fruits and seeds of Neem, an evergreen tree common in India, and is not thought to be harmful to mammals, birds or bees.

The fact that Eliza found no trace of another insecticide called Imidacloprid may have implications in the search for a cause of the mysterious syndrome known as Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) in which worker bees abruptly disappear. CCD is considered a serious threat to the pollination of food crops in the United States and Europe.

“Imidacloprid is under investigation as a contributing factor in CCD,” she said. “The fact that it is not present in the Arboretum honey could suggest that it is killing or disorienting worker bees so they cannot return to the hive.”

The topic will be something she’ll tackle in her next GHS science project. [see McNitt’s followup here]

Although there isn’t any real “news” in this video, it’s important to celebrate the efforts of these two young adults and give props to C-SPAN and them for pumpin’ up the volume! We shouldn’t forget, also, that the Haiti news footage they selected to show “food shortages” comes from the time after the (officially censored) U.S.-sponsored coup of the Haitian government, which has left that already poor country in chaos. Context, context. That country didn’t have much food even before the coup! Better B-roll would have been from the spiking prices in the “First World” supermarkets. Great work, nonetheless. -DNR

Greenwich students win C-SPAN film contest
By Meredith Blake
Staff Writer
Posted: 03/10/2009 11:11:30 PM EDT

After weeks of collecting film clips of honey bee colonies and newsreels on rising food prices and then interviewing leading scientists in the field on colony collapse disorder, Greenwich High School seniors Eliza McNitt and Charles Greene felt ready to complete their documentary for C-SPAN.

Each year the news organization hosts a student documentary contest and this year the topic student films had to address was on the most pressing issue the new president must face.

McNitt and Greene, both 17, chose the problem of the disappearing colonies of honey bees throughout the country and its impact on the cost of food. C-SPAN announced Tuesday that “Requiem for the Honeybee” won first prize out of more than 1000 entries from middle and high school students throughout the country. READ REST…

CAPTION: Greenwich High School seniors Eliza McNitt and Charles Greene received first… (contributed photo)

My recent visions include creating a Live Hive ™. A Live Hive ™ is a high-tech monitored beehive complete with internal, infra-red micro video cameras, chip-tagged bees, microphones to monitor hive audio, external camera to monitor comings and goings, temperature sensors, solar panel - all data fed live to schools around the world via the Internet - LIVE 24hrs. It’s a Real World Beehive Show. We need our young to observe bees, for the sake of their own survival. We can now computer-record thousands of hours of high quality audio without a problem, enabling us to observe the change in frequencies within the hive, which I believe is key to understanding honeybee health and intention. (UPDATE: oops… This cool hive webcam seems to have had my idea already!) Here’s a cool example technology below (not German).

Furthermore, undergraduate UNC student, Andrew Pierce, et al found that the queen doesn’t decide hive actions herself, but rather “older workers gave signals to the queen and to the rest of the colony that it was time to swarm and leave the hive. Later, they were able to observe inside the swarm itself and see workers give the queen a signal, known as ‘piping’ that tells her to fly.” (read: University of North Carolina at Charlotte) How did they do this?

Today I discovered a gem of an article published four years ago in Der Spiegel magazine from Germany (below) that lifts my hopes that my Live Hive ™ concept will become reality sooner.

“In an experiment that’s the first of its kind worldwide, they are creating precise movement profiles for their winged subjects. To this end, tiny transponders have been attached to the backs of thousands of bees. Each radio chip costs one euro and is attached to the bee with a dab of shellac. The chip weighs only 2.4 milligrams, about one-thirtieth of the maximum load a bee can carry, and therefore doesn’t present much of a impediment to the insect.”

The gear exists on the consumer market, we just need to buy the parts off the shelf and deploy the Live Hive ™ in concert with thousands of observing students of all ages to give researchers feedback and notes to accelerate our open knowledge. Google’s computer array should be suitable drive space. Wikipedia that! Pollinatethis!

Finally, Richard C. Hoagland unearthed an interesting nugget about hive sounds in a beekeeper’s recording of a hive noise he heard twice, last back in 2006 - Hoagland played the sound on Art Bell’s radio show (part 9) during a show about Colony Collapse Disorder (along with a bunch more about torsion field energy, and theories that bees build “small cell” comb for the sake of frequency resonance improvement at smaller, natural sizes than with larger, human-prompted foundation size cells… He mentions nothing about mite survival rates in large vs small cell… I appreciated Bell’s critical interviewing.) Sort of funny to hear this guy Hoagland reading from BWrangler’s website on Art Bell’s radio show. Need to learn more about torsion field physics and hexagons. Dr. Adrian Wenner’s work on bee communication is noteworthy for this project, too… Has someone already created the Live Hive? Who wants to fund it for me?

02/21/2005

Big Brother in the Beehive
http://www.spiegel.de/international/spiegel/0,1518,343559,00.html

By Hilmar Schmundt

Bees become increasingly intelligent as they age. They suffer from occupational diseases and travel astronomical distances to produce a jar of honey. Using state-of-the-art monitoring technology, researchers from the German city of Würzburg are revolutionizing our image of mankind’s third most-important working animal.

A snowstorm is raging outside the beehive. Inside, number 6085 is making herself comfortable at a cozy 25° Celsius (77° Fahrenheit) and with an extra serving of sweet nectar.

6085 is a sprightly senior who spends her summers working outside. But for now she is a homebody, spending her time in a world almost entirely of her own making. Her fellow bees expend almost half of their energy making sure their hive is cozy and warm in the winter and pleasantly cool in the summer. The community strictly monitors family planning and carefully controls the intelligence of its offspring. 6085 lives largely sheltered from natural calamities that plague other creatures. Hunger and infirmity are a problem that haven’t plagued bees for over a million years.

“These living conditions sound like something out of a science fiction novel,” says neurobiologist Jürgen Tautz. The white-haired, 55-year-old sits in his office on the second floor of a converted house on the edge of an orchard within sight of the University of Würzburg campus. To convince his skeptical audience that number 6085 truly exists, he proposes an expedition into the exotic world of the bees. Tautz walks down a flight of stairs into his laboratory, where three experimental Plexiglas beehives have been constructed. The beehives even have names, written on paper labels — “Maja,” “Willi” and “Flip.” About a thousand honey bees are crowded into each beehive, including the worker bee identified as number 6085. The Plexiglas window to the hive is warm to the touch, especially near its center, where the royal household crowds around the queen with her long abdomen, making sure she is kept warm, well-fed and clean.

“Bees have achieved many of the things that remain the stuff of dreams for humans,” says Tautz, bright-eyed and speaking with a hint of a local dialect. “We can learn a great deal from them.”

Old bees are the smart ones

CREDIT: DDP / Fiola Bock / Beegroup Wuerzburg

CAPTION: A tiny microchip enables scientists to track the habits of bees.

The members of his 20-member research team routinely astonish the professional world with their articles in such highly-regarded professional journals as Science, Nature and Zoology. Peter Fluri, the director of the Swiss Center for Bee Research in Bern, is impressed by Tautz’s work. “The results coming out of Würzburg are remarkable,” he says, “and their significance extends well beyond the world of bee biology.”The “Beegroup” laboratory routinely dismantles theories previously regarded as scientific certainty. Until recently, for example, zoologists believed that during the famous tail dance, only those bees directly surrounding the ceremony are quickly informed about a source of nectar. However, the Würzburg researchers discovered that the dance is in fact a refined form of more…

National Bee Database to be set up to monitor colony collapse

By Rosa Prince, Political Correspondent
Last Updated: 10:16PM GMT 09 Mar 2009

Britain’s 20,000 amateur beekeepers have been asked to register their insects on a national database in a bid to halt the dramatic decline of the honey bee…

The register, funded by the Department for the Environment, will be used to monitor health trends and help establish for certain whether the £30 million honey industry is under threat from the mysterious Colony Collapse Disorder.

Theories about the cause of the decline in the bee population, which has seen nearly one in three hives collapse, include climate change and an infestation by the Varroa mite. READ REST at the Telegraph…

My Questions:

1. Would beekeepers in the u.S.A ever voluntarily join a national database managed by the U.S. Federal Government?
2. What does £4.3 million really buy??
   
3. Does registering with a government database include creating a GIS from this database? Who owns the data? Since it should be public data, will the database be available in real-time on the Internet for other researchers to use?
4. Making the data publicly available opens the research potential, but at what costs to the beekeeper’s privacy? How much data are they “invited” to submit to the database?
5. Don’t privacy concerns about “a beek’s girls” and business interests get trumped by the dire consequences of failing to understand what’s happening worldwide?
6. Will joining such a database subject the beekeeper to new regulation, oversight and intrusion by (presumably inept) government controllers?

The UK will provide lessons to the North Americans who still can’t get a dime from their government to do real research on the bees. I’m talking federal money for thousands of GPS tagged hives like the rest of the modern world uses to track anything. Basic logic says we need to know where (commercial) hives are going to analyze the data about what they were exposed to, for how long, with which other bees, from where (Australia?), etc. We need data for a GIS, and it can’t be chicken scratched on plastic bags with sharpies, only (dead bees). In the U.S., it seems that the privatized mind thinks that research money should only come from private interests, like Haagan Daaz or the Almond Industry, or the military. Does this opinion come from a jaded viewpoint that federal funding means loss of control and more potential suffocating regulation, a lack of trust in government?

This blog gets a fair amount of traffic, and this commentary on “colony collapse disorder” from a well-known pollination broker in California deserves attention. Also interesting is to read what he had to say about the idea of “beekeepers receiving government subsidies” almost 10 years ago in 1999. This topic is current again in the news.

–DNR

http://www.beesource.com/pov/traynor/bcdec2008.htm

DECEMBER, 2008 issue BEE CULTURE

Joe Traynor

The following is distilled from the reams of disparate dispatches from the CCD front. I have tried to condense this mass of information into a coherent whole. None of what follows is original — all has been expressed in one form or another by others.

When CCD first came on the stage in 2006-2007, a number of possible causes entered the stage at, or close to, the same time:

Drought in many areas
Difficulty in controlling varroa mites
Nosema ceranae (believed to be widespread since at least 2006)
Decreased bee pasture + increased corn acreage
Chemical buildup in comb
Neonicotinoid pesticides

A good argument can be made for any one of these as the main, or sole cause of CCD; a better argument for a combination of two or more. If only one of the above had occurred, it would have been much simpler to either designate or eliminate it as the cause of CCD.

Based on field reports, CCD can devastate a given apiary in a short period of time, sweeping from one end to the other, leaving previously populous colonies with only a handful of bees and a queen. Since rapid decline of an organism (consider, as many have, a honey bee colony to be an individual organism) is typical of a pathogen, current thinking is that a pathogen, either N. ceranae or a virus (or a combination of both) is the basic cause of CCD.

If a virus causes CCD, is it a new “super” virus, or one of the known bee viruses – Kashmir, DWV, APV et al. — or perhaps a mutation of a known virus to a more virulent form? We don’t know, but assuming that a virus causes CCD allows us to speculate on remedial measures.

Consider other CCD-like problems in humans and plants:

In each of the above instances, the Target can withstand the Vector in the absence of the Pathogen – mosquitoes are a minor concern to us if they don’t harbor a pathogen; without a READ THE REST…

THE BEST place to see classes is on the Calendar: http://pollinatethis.org/beeblog/sf-beekeepers-calendar/

March 7th Beekeepers Guild of San Mateo County
BEGINNING BEEKEEPING CLASS 9:15AM - 4PM
1st Congregational Church, 751 Alameda de las Pulgas, Belmont.
Cost: Free Bring your own bag lunch.
More info & pre-registration is required: http://www.sanmateo bee.org/class. html

March 14th Alameda County Beekeepers Assn
INTRODUCTION TO BEEKEEPING CLASS 10AM-12:30PM
2418 California St, Berkeley
Cost: ?
Registration required: Jim 510-845-2419
Do not wear scents, wool or dark clothes. A veil would be good to have.

March 15th Green Gulch Farm & Zen Center
BEGINNING BEEKEEPING 9AM-3PM
More information & Registration: http://www.sfzc. org/zc/search. asp?keyword= beekeeping& search.x= 16&search. y=3

March 21st Alameda County Beekeepers Assn
RANDY OLIVER BEEKEEPING CLASS 9AM - 3PM
Island Yacht Club, 1853 Clement Ave, Alameda (behind Svendsen’s Boat Works along the Marina…courtesy of Jayne Klugs’s family)
Cost: $10 members, $20 non-members Bring your own LUNCH. The bar at the Yacht Club will be open at lunch time - cash only.
More info & pre-registration, send email to: Sarachickbee@ aol.com

Various dates March, April, May & June BeeKind
BEGINNING BEEKEEPING WORKSHOPS
BeeKind, Sebastopol
More info & pre-registration: http://www.beekind. com/beekeeping_ classes_2009. shtml

The international Demeter Association certifies Biodynamic® agriculture and its guidelines are considered the highest and strictest in the world. The Melissa Garden is utilizing biodynamic agriculture methods and will seek Demeter certification. By extension, our beekeeper, Michael Thiele, is practicing biodynamic beekeeping methods.

• Honey and blossom pollen are the natural foods for bees. The aim should be to winter them on honey. Where this is not possible supplementary winter feed must contain at least 10% honey by weight. Chamomile tea and salt should also be added to the feed. All feed supplements must be of organic if not Biodynamic origin. All pollen substitutes are forbidden.

A bee colony should be able to correct any occurring imbalances out of its own resources. Measures taken by the Demeter beekeeper should aim to reinforce and maintain its vitality and capacity for self regeneration. The occasional loss of colonies particularly susceptible to certain pests and diseases should be accepted as a necessary part of natural selection.

(Beyond Pesticides, March 4, 2009) The Ontario government is set to announce sweeping new regulations that will prohibit the use of 85 chemical substances, found in roughly 250 lawn and garden products, from use on neighborhood lawns. Once approved, products containing these chemicals would be barred from sale and use for cosmetic purposes.

On November 7, 2008, the Ontario government released a proposed new regulation containing the specifics of the Cosmetic Pesticides Ban Act, passed last June. Then, Ontario joined Quebec in restricting the sale and cosmetic use of pesticides but environmental and public health advocates said then that the new law preempted local by-laws and actually weakens protections in some municipalities with stronger local protections. There are over 55 municipalities in Canada where the residential use, but not sale, of pesticides is banned. The prohibition of these 85 substances is the latest step in this Act. The proposal contains:

• List of pesticides (ingredients in pesticide products) to be banned for cosmetic use
• List of pesticide products to be banned for sale
• List of domestic pesticide products to be restricted for sale. Restricted sale products include those with cosmetic and non-cosmetic uses (i.e., a product that’s allowed to be used inside the house but not for exterior cosmetic use), and would not be available self-serve.

The 85 chemicals to be prohibited are listed under “Proposed Class 9 Pesticides” of the Act. Among the 85 pesticides banned for cosmetic use include commonly used lawn chemicals: 2,4-D (Later’s Weed-Stop Lawn Weedkiller), clopyralid, glyphosate (Roundup Lawn & Weed Control Concentrate), imidacloprid, permethrin (Later’s Multi-Purpose Yard & Garden Insect Control), pyrethrins (Raid Caterpillar & Gypsy Moth Killer), and triclopyr.

However, golf courses and sports fields remain exempt. The use of pesticides for public health safety (e.g. mosquito control) is also exempt. The proposed regulation would also allow for the use of new ‘notice’ signs to make the public aware when low risk alternatives to conventional pesticides are used by licensed exterminators, such as the use of corn gluten meal to suppress weed germination in lawns.

The prohibition, once passed, would likely take effect in mid-April. Stores would be forced to remove banned products from their shelves or inform customers that the use of others is restricted to certain purposes. Residents must then dispose of banned products through municipal hazardous waste collection, and use restricted products for only prescribed purposes. Errant users would first receive a warning, but fines would later be introduced.

By 2011, stores will be required to limit access to the pesticides, keeping them locked behind glass or cages and ensuring that customers are aware of limitations on use before taking them home.

In light on impeding legislation to restrict pesticide use, the Canadian division of Home Depot announced on April 22, 2008 that it will stop selling traditional pesticides in its stores across Canada by the end of 2008 and will increase its selection of environmentally friendly alternatives. Other garden supply and grocery stores have already stopped selling certain pesticides in Ontario.

This proposed prohibition would have the most impact on 2,4-D, the most popular and widely used lawn chemical. 2,4-D, which kills broad leaf weeds like dandelions, is an endocrine disruptor with predicted human health risks ranging from changes in estrogen and testosterone levels, thyroid problems, prostate cancer and reproductive abnormalities. A recent petition filed with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and supported by Beyond Pesticides calls for the cancellation of 2,4-D, its products and its tolerances in the U.S.

Other lawn chemicals like glyphosate (Round-up) and permethrin have also been linked to serious adverse chronic effects in humans. Imidacloprid, another pesticide growing in popularity, has been implicated in bee toxicity and the recent Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) phenomena. The health effects of the 30 most commonly used lawn pesticides show that: 14 are probable or possible carcinogens, 15 are linked with birth defects, 21 with reproductive effects, 24 with neurotoxicity, 22 with liver or kidney damage, and 34 are sensitizers and/or irritants.

Reference: http://www.ene.gov.on.ca/en/news/2009/030401.php

Rudolf Steiner gave 8 Lectures in Dornach, Germany Nov. 26, 1923 to Dec 22, 1923 entitled “Bees.“ I’m inspired to repost an excerpt of The Doyletics Foundation’s take on “Bees.” http://www.doyletics.com/arj/beesrvw.htm

-DNR

“… The Sun undergoes a complete rotation every 21 days. Coincidence or insight into a cosmic connection of us with the Sun? You decide. Steiner takes us through the gestation of the various bees, showing us that the Queen Bee only stays in the larval stage for 16 days, and as such she does not experience every aspect of the Sun in its rotation. The Queen is fully developed while she is still very much connected with the Sun. The worker, on the other hand, has spent the full Sun

cycle of 21 days in the larval stage and has all of the effects of the Sun inside of it. The drones, however, have remained several days longer than the workers in their larval stage and developed thereby an attachment to the Earth. Steiner tells us that because of their different gestation periods, the Queen Bee remained attached to the Sun, the workers to the Queen Bee, and the drones to the Earth. Read his explanation for why this is important to the operation of the hive and relate it to the 21 day habit formation process.

[page 9] The queen can lay eggs because the Sun effect is always within it, and it hasn’t anything at all of the Earth’s effect upon development. The worker continues its development for four to five days longer. It makes use of every influence the Sun has to offer. But then it enters slightly, for just a moment, into the Earth development’s sphere of influence . . . This is why it can’t lay eggs. The drones are fertile males; this fertilization capability comes from the Earth. The drones acquire the power to fertilize from the few days longer they are exposed, as incomplete insects, to the influence of Earth development. This leads us to the conclusion that with bees you can see clearly that the male’s fertilization powers come from the energies given by the Earth, whereas the female capability to develop eggs derives from the Sun’s energies.

There are two dramatic events in the life of a beehive: the nuptial flight of the Queen Bee and swarming. During its nuptial flight, the Queen takes off during a day when the Sun is present and flies towards the Sun, to which it is still attached, as high as it can. Following close behind it is a flight of drones who will attempt to impregnate the Queen. At the highest point of the Queen’s flight she is fertilized and returns to the hive to begin laying her eggs.

Why do bees leave the hive in a swarm? Steiner’s explanation is that the poison in the bee’s body causes its eyes to almost entirely close. Bees live in a twilight more…

World View Radio Show 03/02/2009

“Eighty percent of the world’s crop plants depend on pollination. The fewer bees pollinating fields, the lower the yield from every acre of food crops we eat. Without bees, our food will disappear. The mass disappearance of bees, first reported in 2006, is referred to as colony collapse disorder or (CCD).

Dr. Gabriela Chavarria is Science Center Director at the Natural Resources Defense Council and a research associate at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History. She’s a leading expert on pollinators.“

WBEZ Radio Chicago: http://www.wbez.org/Content.aspx?audioID=32496

NRDC Forced to Sue to Get Public Records on Bee Mystery

EPA Buzz Kill: Is the Agency Hiding Colony Collapse Disorder Information?

NRDC Forced to Sue to Get Public Records on Bee Mystery

WASHINGTON, DC (August 18, 2008) – The Natural Resources Defense Council filed a lawsuit today to uncover critical information that the US government is withholding about the risks posed by pesticides to honey bees. NRDC legal experts and a leading bee researcher are convinced that the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has evidence of connections between pesticides and the mysterious honey bee die-offs reported across the country. The phenomenon has come to be called “colony collapse disorder,” or CCD, and it is already proving to have disastrous consequences for American agriculture and the $15 billion worth of crops pollinated by bees every year.

EPA has failed to respond to NRDC’s Freedom of Information Act request for agency records concerning the toxicity of pesticides to bees, forcing the legal action.

“Recently approved pesticides have been implicated in massive bee die-offs and are the focus of increasing scientific scrutiny,” said NRDC Senior Attorney Aaron Colangelo. “EPA should be evaluating the risks to bees before approving new pesticides, but now refuses to tell the public what it knows. Pesticide restrictions might be at the heart of the solution to this growing crisis, so why hide the information they should be using to make those decisions?”

READ REST: http://anarchyapiaries.org/hivetools/node/28

(Mainichi Japan) March 4, 2009

There are too few honeybees in Japan. While one immediately associates the busy yellow and black insects with honey, Japan’s honey production is not the area of agriculture most threatened by the decline in the bee population. Fruit and vegetable farmers also depend on honeybees to pollinate their plants, and the shortage of bees has gone so far as to create fears of a produce shortage, one that could threaten dinner tables across Japan.

“I didn’t think for a moment that we would have a shortage,” laments Osamu Mamuro, president of Mamuro Bee Farm in Yoshimi, Saitama Prefecture, as he stands in front of one of the firm’s beehives. Mamuro Bee Farm supplies honeybees for pollination to farmers.

In a normal year, from now through spring, Mamuro would be busy buying up honeybees from beekeepers in and outside the prefecture and distributing them to farms. This year, however, Mamuro has found it difficult to meet demand, and deliveries to customers will drop to less than half the usual amount.

“If this keeps up,” Mamuro says, “it’ll be the end of my business.”
CAPTION: “The honeybees just don’t gather,” laments Osamu Mamuro, president of Mamuro Bee Farm in Yoshimi, Saitama Prefecture. (Mainichi)

Honeybees are essential in the pollination of fruit and vegetable plants such as strawberries, watermelons, melons, eggplants, Japanese pears, cherries, blueberries and so on. Fruit and vegetable producers buy honeybees just for pollination purposes and release them in their fields and greenhouses.

The honeybee shortage is attributable to a sharp decrease in the number of those kept by beekeepers. According to Maruto Tokai Co., a major supplier of honeybees to agricultural cooperatives all across the country, the crisis has become severe enough to “threaten the destruction of the industry.”

A sudden drop in the honeybee population is not an experience limited to Japan. In fact, a similar shortage began in the United States three years ago. The autumn of 2006 to the spring of 2007 saw a particularly alarming decline in bee numbers, when around 30 percent of American bees suddenly disappeared, a phenomenon called Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD). The underlying cause of CCD is as yet unknown.

In Japan as well, in the past several years there have been instances of sudden mass die-offs and disappearances in honeybee colonies in Iwate Prefecture and Hokkaido.

The Japan Beekeeping Association (JBA), composed of 2,500 honeybee professionals, undertook a survey of its membership to determine the breadth of the honeybee population decline. The survey, which received responses from 36 percent of the association’s membership, was conducted by a three person team, including Kiyoshi Kimura, head researcher at the National Institute of Livestock and Grassland Science, and Tatsuhiko Kadowaki, associate professor at Nagoya University, from August to December last year.

The survey revealed that one in four respondents had “experienced sudden losses of honeybees.” The scale of these losses varied, but “the number of beekeepers to lose large numbers of bees was more than we expected,” says Kimura.

Kimura visited the United States in December last year to observe the American situation.

“There have been small-scale honeybee losses for many years, but a massive collapse like they had in the U.S. is very unusual,” says Kimura, comparing the Japanese problem with the American CCD crisis of three years ago. “We must investigate the situation in Japan.”

Japan is home to many small-scale beekeeping operations. Unlike their American cousins, beekeepers in Japan do not often transport their honeybees long distances, meaning there is less stress that could affect the survival of the insects.

According to the JBA, Japan imports the vast majority of its honey, with only around 6 percent coming from domestic producers. As such, the honeybee population crisis “will not interfere with domestic honey production.”

However, the shortage of honeybees means real problems for fruit and vegetable farmers, who need the insects to get on with the vital work of pollination.

“From now on, it is possible that it will be increasingly difficult to secure honeybees for the purposes of pollinating eggplant, melon, watermelon and other produce plants,” says the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries.

“We are desperately trying to collect enough honeybees,” says the Inba agricultural cooperative in Sakura, Chiba Prefecture, as its members prepare for the watermelon pollination season in April. Uneasy voices can also be heard among strawberry, Japanese pear and melon farmers in nearby Tochigi Prefecture. The honeybee shortage means that these and other farmers may have to resort to pollinating their produce plants by hand.

READ STORY http://mdn.mainichi.jp/mdnnews/news/20090304p2a00m0na002000c.html

It’s been almost a year since I began my CCD Mapping website, which has yet to launch… Nice to get motivated by another fantastic mapping project, the Feral Bee Project, “a site focused on creating a national database of feral honey bee populations.” Ronnie Bouchon built the site himself from the ground up using Google’s API and Google spreadsheets. Hat’s off to this committed human being! Some people in my beekeeping club actually thought it was a bad idea to map feral colonies, out of some fear that people would go mess with them now that they knew where there were. Overprotective bee lovers?

The possibilities of using the Feral Bee Project’s data to build heat maps and do other analysis excites me to get my participatory CCD mapping site off the ground. As Ronnie has done, I am ever-evaluating the mapping technologies and Google’s tools are tempting. I like the benefits of his site design: no “user log-in” or “registration” to thwart the average nature-not-computer lover, no submission approval process (not yet warranted, he reports), and a nice interface for finding your place on the map. But I’ve always been partial to hosting all of my project data on my own sites, instead of relying on Google spreadsheets hosted who knows where. It is fantastic to have all the data in an accessible spreadsheet, however, instead of buried in some SQL database, IMO.

The sensitivity about mapping colony collapse disorder events makes such an open methodology difficult to gain acceptance, I’ve assumed. Perhaps that assumption is wrong. Now that we have something of a definitive list of symptoms and patterns being published this month about how to recognize CCD, perhaps a community-generated dataset won’t be filled with speculative points that may dilute the value and accuracy of the data collected. What do you think? I’ll invite Ronnie Bouchon to comment. His site, Savethehives.com lists another project in the works and it would be great to get an update on how that is going.

“With all the media coverage and public awareness of Colony Collapse Disorder, there is still not a single database of reported cases of CCD. The CCD Map would be provide a web-based approach for collecting and presenting reported cases of CCD in a way that could help researchers and government agencies understand this national crisis. This national database of information will be centrally maintained and available to research programs and universities.”

- Savethehives.com

Ronnie, any news about the CCD mapping project? What have been your biggest hurdles and what do your collaborators in the beekeeping world say about creating a CCD map? Comment here for us.

The magic of RSS delivers news to me that I used to only get by sitting in the local diner in smalltown USA reading the local paper. But we still never know how long the online news links will last, so I’m copying this little story for the record about another “sideline” beekeeper and his need for California almond contracts. If beekeepers were to receive government subsidies, as may happen with this recent “stimulus” bill, I wonder how many beekeepers would still haul their bees all around the country for pollination services. I wonder… if they could stay at home with the reassurance of government checks (as Farm Bill subsidies provide to other agricultural activities), if California would be forced to evolve its local hive capacity to the point of keeping the migratory pollination services for the almond crop LOCAL. What would our pollinator landscape look like if we invested in local capacity building of beekeepers and pollinator maintenance? Would we still have diesel semi trucks hauling bees imported from Australia and, uh, Wyoming, USA? With peak oil now an obvious reality, it is not sustainable to rely on a struggling trucker community to bring bees everywhere? I know, I know, there isn’t enough bloom and habitat to sustain bees in many places… Well, let’s imagine a different reality. CHANGE. PLANT. SOW. -DNR

Ranchester beekeeper rents pollinators to California almond growers

By JUDY HAGEROTT
Star-Tribune correspondent
Casper Star-Tribune Online, WY - Feb 2, 2009

Monday, February 2, 2009 7:03 PM MST
RANCHESTER — Clifford Reed remembers looking over the sweet clover-covered hills near Ranchester last spring and thinking, “This should be a great year for honey.”

A strong dose of reality hit Reed once mites were discovered in his bee colonies.

“I didn’t treat for mites and it cost me,” the owner of Tongue River Honey said.

He won’t make the same mistake this year.

“I had to pull off 320 dead colonies,” Reed said. “With 25,000 to 30,000 bees per hive, that’s a lot of dead bees.

“Once mites reach a certain threshold in a colony of bees, the bees just take off for greener pastures. For those bees that remain, if they catch a virus from the mites, the bee offspring turn into runty, pitiful bees with a short lifespan.”

The timing was terrible. Last year, more…

The Co-op today became the first UK supermarket to ban the use of a group of pesticides implicated in billions of honeybee deaths worldwide.

It is prohibiting suppliers of its own-brand fresh produce from using eight pesticides that have been connected to honeybee colony collapse disorder and are already restricted in some parts of Europe.

The Co-op said it will eliminate the usage of the neonicotinoid family of chemicals where possible and until they are shown to be safe. The Co-op has over 70,000 acres of land under cultivation in England and Scotland, making it the largest farmer in the UK. Since 2001, it has already prohibited the use of 98 pesticides under its pesticide policy.

Simon Press, senior technical manager at the Co-op group said: “We believe that the recent losses in bee populations need definitive action, and as a result are temporarily prohibiting the eight neonicotinoid pesticides until we have evidence that refutes their involvement in the decline.”

Laboratory tests suggest that one of the banned chemicals, imidacloprid, can impede honeybees’ sophisticated communication and navigation systems. It has been banned in France for a decade as a seed dressing on sunflowers. Italy, Slovenia and Germany banned neonicotinoids last year after the loss of millions of honeybees. And the European Parliament voted earlier this month for tougher controls on bee-toxic chemicals.

Read rest: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/jan/28/bees-coop-pesticide

Fox News gets some points for actually interviewing a beekeeper about the current pollinator crisis and dedicating five minutes to it, with a cute studio backdrop with props and all (you go, David Burns!)… My question to Fox News host, Neil Cavuto, “if the Corn (syrup) industry can get paid NOT to grow corn in U.S. through the subsidy programs for decades, and the obscene pork riders can go unchecked, unreported, unchallenged during the Republican Congressional bills for your War, etc, isn’t it obtuse to challenge the nation’s beekeepers in their attempt to find financial relief along with Wall Street and Detroit?!” Beekeepers literally put food on your table! Oil Industry/U.S. automakers flew in private jets to D.C. to get a giant taxpayer handout for actually failing to produce a product that meets modern needs (sustainability, fuel efficiency, etc.). $150 million is a drop in the bucket to protect the food supply.

Thank you, for creating the dialog, Fox News. However, you supported giant government for the War Industry for 8 years, plus. You can’t backpedal now when a truly important industry needs 100% bailout relief and subsidy. Cavuto, taxpayers should fund and are happy to fund beekeepers because of their role in farming and food. Your free market is a myth, get over it. Let the auto industry collapse and support the industries that we really need: farmers, pollinators and other sustainable enterprises.

The Obama Team should be setting benchmark goals of doubling or tripling the nation’s beekeeper population, which has been dwindling steadily ever since the 1950s’ suburban sprawl of monocultural, agri-chemical food production began spreading here. I’ve suggested in the past that the Veterans’ Administration deploy a program to train returning Vets to become beekeepers! Pay them, train them, redeploy them - in the peaceful fields of the united States. They will heal. They will rediscover the meaning and beauty of being human through nurturing this magical relationship with these insects, and our society needs to heal them to heal us. -DNR

Related: http://townhall.com/news/business/2008/12/26/the_latest_buzz_for_beekeepers_is_crop_insurance

WATCH VIDEO: http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,488487,00.html