Information! Best regards, Harald Singer.
  1.13.2008 12:13PM4 Reasons Pesticides are Bad for BeesBeekeepers: Poisons
May Not Cause Colony Collapse Disorder, But They Contribute  By Kim
Flottum The
Beekeeper reports from the first ever National Beekeeping Conference:Now,
what everyone has been waiting for ... beekeepers telling beekeepers about their
personal experiences with Colony collapse Disorder (CCD). But wait! There’s
more here than just a mystery. There’s pesticides aplenty here, and even if
they
aren’t the CCD curse, they are killing bees faster than beekeepers can make
them.
Chemical Companies Approve Their Own Pesticides David Mendes, a
Massachusetts/Florida beekeeper with 7,000 colonies, talked about pesticides in
the
environments his bees must visit when pollinating crops and how these chemicals
may
be contributing to his problems ... and his problems are significant this year,
as they were last year. His first comment was that pesticides aren’t tested
by the EPA, nope. Pesticides are tested by the Chemical companies that make
them, and then the EPA approves them for use, or not. Any guesses on how those
results come out?He talked about not only the financial but emotional stress
loosing 60 – 80% of your bees has on beekeepers ... anything more than 50% in
a
year and it gets real, real hard to recover. Two years in a row and you could
be looking for a job as a greeter at Wal-Mart. What’s different now, he asks
... And why me?
"Big Ag," with Chemical Henchmen, Control the USDA David Hackenburg, the
first to report Colony Collapse Disorder (but not the first to watch it run
through his hives, certainly), first told about the 2,000 or so colonies he had
moved to Florida last week. This week, 80% were gone ... again. Gone with the
same
symptoms of CCD he saw in his bees last year. He quoted Jerry Hayes, the
State Apiary Inspector from Florida (where CCD is common) who said that “
beekeeping was the ugly step-child of American agricultureâ€Â. How so? The
government has
made lots of promises about studying and fixing the CCD problem so far,
Hackenburg said ... but so far not much has happened. He said he hasn’t been
too
happy with Australian bees so far – not saying anything about their
implication
in CCD (one disputed study suggested an Australian virus is connected to hives
affected by CCD). He also mentioned pesticides, specifically Imadacloprid
(banned in France, but not here), and how it was used everywhere, by everybody.
But he went on, and I quote ... â€ÂBig Ag has control of the USDA from the
Secretary right on down to almost the lowest guys on the totem pole.†What to
do?
Get a hold of your congress folks and get them to take some action ... get the
money out, get control of the chemicals.
"Stacking" Makes Poisoning More Potent Dave Ellingson, another commercial
beekeeper and beeswax processor talked about doing everything the way he had
been
doing things ... and nothing was working. It used to be, when a colony dies,
you air it out and reuse it. Now, that new colony will die too. His pesticide
comment was that farmers are now "stacking" pesticides. That is, they are
combining insecticides, herbicides and fungicides in a single trip across the
field instead of taking three separate trips. The problem? When combined, these
chemical blends become a thousand times more toxic than when used alone. A
thousand times more toxic. Imagine.
Fungicides: The Breakfast of Champions? Gene Brandi, a commercial beekeeper
with 2,000 colonies, talked about one specific pesticide problem: Spraying
fungicides on blooming plants. Generally these compounds aren’t harmful to
honey
bees ... adult honey bees that is, which is all the EPA makes the chemical
companies consider when they test new pesticides (remember who does the tests,
and
who approves the results). Meanwhile, these non-adult-harming compounds that
are brought back to the hive are being fed to baby bees. Would you feed
fungicides to your babies? No? Neither would I. But we are routinely letting
honey
bees do just that. These chemicals come back to hives on the pollen the bees
collect, then store, then feed to their children. Yummmm.Pesticides aren’t the
cause of Colony Collapse Disorder. Beekeepers and scientists know this. But the
stress that constant exposure to pesticides exerts on the honey bee
population, and the strain this stress puts on a honey bee’s immune system is
just one
of many links in the CCD chain. The problem is obvious. The solution is too.
http://www.thedailygreen.com/environmental-news/blogs/bees/colony-collapse-disorder-66011301