Bees: Closer to Home
The disappearance of the bees hits New Jersey
Jean-Claude Tassot felt the sunshine spilling over his shoulders. It was unseasonably warm for January — a good day, he decided, to check his honeybees. So Tassot jumped in his truck and rumbled over the back roads of Morris County to the first of the eight farms where he stores his boxes of hives.
“When you first take the cover off, usually you can see the bees,” said Tassot. “But when I looked, there was nothing. I kept looking (but) the hives were all dead.”
[snip]
“I’ve talked to several beekeepers up and down the state, and they’re reporting from 30 to 99 percent bee losses,” said Bob Hughes, president of the New Jersey Beekeepers Association.Built around the state insect of New Jersey, the honeybee industry is a $2.5 million business and provides pollination for 80 percent of the state’s crops worth some $200 million, according to the state department of agriculture. Even so, there is currently no state apiarist, or beekeeper, (the previous one retired and no replacement has been named) and no state university or government bee researcher.
“In the Garden State no one is doing research on the honeybee?” said Janet Katz, who owns Two Cats Apiaries in Chester. “It’s mind-boggling. They research everything else in agriculture, but not bees. We’re desperate.”
Beatrice Tassot is even more blunt: “People are panicking.”
[snip]
Tassot and his wife believe they know why their bees have disappeared.
“We have suspicions about pesticides,” he said. “We noticed most of the dead hives are close to cornfields. … And when we asked other beekeepers what was the principle crop near their hives, they said corn, corn, corn.”
Simone, of Morris Township, agrees. “When I spoke with other beekeepers they say all their hives with heavy losses are near cornfields.”
Many farmers in the United States and around the world rely on genetically engineered corn to survive the assault of crop-killing insects. The seeds are coated with a systemic pesticide that is essentially built into the corn as it grows.
One of the chief chemicals used is a neurotoxin called imidacloprid, which is manufactured by the German company Bayer CropScience. Imidacloprid works by blocking a pathway in insect brains that results in an accumulation of a neurotransmitter which, in insects, leads to paralysis and death.
At sublethal doses, however, imidacloprid is toxic to honeybees. In a 2001 article in the Journal of Pesticide Reform, German scientist Eric Zeisstoff wrote that his research “indicated that bees affected by imidacloprid suffer problems with orientation. Bees with a particular level of imidacloprid contamination at 500 meters from the colony did not return to the hive at all.”
Go read the rest. “It has been estimated that a third of all food (nuts, fiber, fruit and vegetables) eaten by Americans is dependent on the honeybee.”
We had better figure out, and damn quickly, what’s happening to the bees, and whether it can be stopped, or we’re not going to have to worry about Atkins Diets much longer. Or maybe we can all survive on corn chips.
h/t: Somegirl
4 Responses to “Bees: Closer to Home”
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.
April 16th, 2007 at 1:37 pm
When ethanol or other corn by-product is suggested to replace our dependence on petroleum I am nearly horrified. Our corn mono-culture is going to be responsible for as many environmental ills as petroleum is.
Our N-K-K fertilizer dependency coupled with genetic hankypankery has thus far masked the amount the environment has been decimated by growing corn unsustainably, but the bees could be the harbinger.
FWIW, I came across a website today that theorizes that cell phones are to blame for the deaths of the bees: http://gods4suckers.net/
April 19th, 2007 at 7:54 am
[...] case you’ve been wondering, it appears we can thank genetically-engineered corn. Permalink [...]
April 19th, 2007 at 12:52 pm
Corn may be killing your bees but our bees are being killed by mobile phones!
July 30th, 2007 at 8:59 am
[...] By Brendan I’ve written before about the impact of massive honeybee collapse in the US. Honeybees have never had an easy time here: they’re European imports and the climate [...]