Colony Collapse Disorder

A friend forwarded an article in the Washington City Paper by Franklin Schneider on honeybee Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD). There has been much about this in the press of late, but little has been in-depth. This hits a bit harder. Moreover, it features what I currently believe to be the root problem as its focus, a new form of pesticide (imidacloprid) that, by its very nature, is impossible to keep away from bees. Honeybees then, through their natural behavior and the way that they produce their food, impregnate their entire colonies with this "carcinogen."

About to give up, I remember a major beekeeper in Maryland who’d mentioned he’d heard from some colleagues that high-fructose corn syrup tainted with genetically modified organisms could be the culprit. I get a number for a corn syrup dealer in Pennsylvania (he prefers to stay anonymous, for reasons which will soon become clear). I ask him right off the bat if he has any guesses as to what’s causing CCD.

“I don’t need to guess,” he says, chuckling. He sounds as if he’d been waiting for someone to call for quite a while. “I know what’s causing CCD.”

Yes, well?

“I don’t know if I should talk about this,” the source says. “I’m connected with a lot of people very close to this CCD investigation, and I know that there are researchers who are very careful about what they say—they’re almost afraid for their lives.”

After some coaxing, this guy tells me his fantastical story. CCD was triggered, he says, by a class of pesticides widely used to treat seeds. The plants that grow from these treated seeds incorporate the pesticide into their entire systems, from roots to leaves to stems to pollen and nectar. When pests (or bees) feed on treated plants, the chemical destroys their nervous system. The people in charge know that this particular type of pesticide is causing CCD, but he claims they’re keeping it quiet—and spending millions to make sure others keep it that way. At the end of his story—it takes an hour to tell and includes other nefarious and high-level government conspiracies—he instructs me to look up a list of pesticides, spelling the names out laboriously as I write them down.

When the phone call ends, it seems obvious that the guy is paranoid, if not outright delusional. Except a lot of his story checks out. The pesticides he cited, marketed under the names Poncho, Admire, and Calypso, belong to a class of chemicals called neonicotinoids, “systemic” pesticides which, when applied to seeds, manifest themselves throughout the mature plant. When an insect ingests any part of the plant—leaf, seed, stem, or, in the case of bees, pollen or nectar, it gets a dose of a neurotoxin that can cause a swift and lethal breakdown of an insect’s nervous and immune system. For growers, this pesticide is efficient and limits their own exposure to nasty chemicals sprayed directly on their crops. Introduced in the early ’90s, these pesticides were a true revolution in pest control.

But not all insects are pests. In fact, one of these chemicals, imidacloprid, is the very same pesticide—marketed here as Admire and overseas as Gaucho—that was banned in France in 1999 as a suspected culprit in drastic and mysterious die-offs in honeybees. Bayer, the German pharmaceutical and chemical company better known for aspirin, has a crop science division that manufactures and sells Gaucho and many other pesticides. The company protested the ban in France, citing studies that found no correlation between imidacloprid and bee die-offs; beekeepers countered with their own studies that found the opposite result. The French government sided with the beekeepers, and the ban stayed in place and was expanded in 2004. Imidacloprid/Gaucho/Admire is used on a wide selection of fruits and vegetables in the United States, including apples, strawberries, and melons—all crops routinely pollinated by bees—and countless others.

…

Whether or not my source’s conspiracy theories hold water, if imidacloprid really is killing bees, we’re left with at least two equally discomfiting possibilities. One: Big Chemical failed to adequately test imidacloprid and unknowingly released a pesticide that’s killing the only natural pollinators we have left. Or, two: Big Chemical knew imidacloprid would kill off our primary pollinators and released it anyway. If the latter seems puzzling, consider this question: If all the bees died out, how much would Big Chemical, the global leaders in genetically modified crops, stand to gain from a sudden demand for self-pollinating crops? [My italics.]

I will, of course, continue to research this topic as it is near and dear my heart. When I find new and/or interesting information, it will end up here.

27 June 2007