Boston Globe: Harvard scientist links pesticides to honeybee colony collapse

[Generic Other]

Lu, Warchol, and Callahan sketched out a plan. In the spring of 2010, they would set up 20 hives at four locations, two in Uxbridge and two in Northbridge. They would feed all the hives high fructose corn syrup, mimicking a common commercial beekeeping practice. (Beekeepers typically supplement their colonies’ food supply with syrup or sugar.) In four of the five hives at each site, the syrup would contain imidacloprid, a commonly used neonicotinoid. The fifth hive, the control in the experiment, would be fed syrup not dosed with pesticide.

They began with a population of roughly 220,000 bees that grew into 1.4 million or so. On July 1, 2010, they started the pesticide regimen, beginning with very low doses, to make sure they didn’t kill the bees right away. They upped the amounts after four weeks to levels that Lu says were on the conservative end of what bees encounter in the real world?—?through syrup made from corn treated with neonicotinoids or nectar and pollen collected from contaminated flowers and crops. The four pesticide-laced hives at every site were given different concentrations of imidacloprid.
Part of the hive in Northbridge.

Winter came, and they saw nothing. The hives seemed fine. “We were starting to get discouraged,” Warchol says. “Dick and I were talking, saying, ‘Wow, there’s really nothing going on.’ ” Lu had the same reaction. “At that time,” he says, “I thought my hypothesis was wrong.”

Then everything started to change. Around the beginning of 2011, a beekeeper whose yard they were using as a testing site reported seeing a mass of bees suddenly fleeing one of the hives. It was suicide?—?to endure the winter, honeybees typically cluster together inside their hive for warmth, surviving on food that a beekeeper has provided to sustain them. Some of the bees had dropped dead on the surrounding snow. The rest had disappeared.

http://www.bostonglobe.com/magazine/2013/06/22/the-harvard-scientist-linking-pesticides-honeybee-colony-collapse-disorder/nXvIA5I6IcxFRxEOc8tpFI/story.html

One Associate Professor from Harvard, who managed to get his study published after the EPA and others tried to stop it, links bee death to pesticides and those with agendas jump to the conclusion that these chemicals are harmful to bees.

[Buzz Clik]

1. The EPA tried to stop that study? When?

[Generic Other]

4. No they didn't try to stop the study

They just ignored it, contradicted it, disinvited him to the Science Fair, blah blah blah...Not exactly promoting him.
They don't like his conclusions because Neonicotinoids pay their salaries.

[Buzz Clik]

5. "Neonicotinoids pay their salaries." Well, okay.

Here's a joint report from USDA and EPA from this year that put neonicotinoids as one of the main causes of colony collapse disorder.

http://www.usda.gov/documents/ReportHoneyBeeHealth.pdf

[Generic Other]

7. So they know it kills and still they allow the poison to be sold

The EPA, in particular, has come under heavy criticism for allowing pesticide manufacturers to start selling new products after limited safety testing and then leaving it up to the companies themselves to provide further data down the road. “It’s a formula that is designed to fail, and it’s doing just that,” says Steve Ellis, a longtime commercial beekeeper in Barrett, Minnesota, who says he lost 65 percent of his hives in the 2012-2013 winter. “And the bee industry is failing because of it.” Ellis belongs to a group of beekeepers and environmental organizations that filed a lawsuit against the EPA in March alleging the agency has been negligent in pesticide regulation....Kim Kaplan, a spokeswoman for the USDA’s Agricultural Research Service, says pesticides are critical to food production and that crop yields would be substantially lower without them. “We have a lot of people to feed,” she says. “So who goes without?”

The government, Kaplan says, can’t hastily take neonicotinoids off the shelf unless the science is clear, an argument echoed by EPA officials. Kaplan insists the government is looking hard at pesticides, including the scenario that chronic exposure is a catalyst that makes bees more susceptible to other problems.

http://www.bostonglobe.com/magazine/2013/06/22/the-harvard-scientist-linking-pesticides-honeybee-colony-collapse-disorder/nXvIA5I6IcxFRxEOc8tpFI/story.html

[Buzz Clik]

8. You're having trouble settling in on a focal point for your argument:

1. You claimed that EPA tried to stop research on the pesticides, but you then said that was not true.
2. You then said that they tried to suppress the information from the studies. Well, that wasn't correct because they published the results of the studies in a report.
3. Now you want to argue that the science is rock solid against the pesticide and that EPA is allowing the use of them anyway.

Well, the science is not settled, but you will trudge on.

[Generic Other]

9. Doesn't matter what the science says

If I don't want your chemical contamination of my food or your bee die offs caused by the chemicals, that is the end of the argument. You can't buy me off like the EPA. You can't force me or any other opponent to back down and eat your shit. Organics cost more, but they are not poison. You yell about there being no proof that contaminating healthy food with pesticide is problematic, no proof of harm to bees in spite of massive bee deaths everywhere the chemicals are being sprayed -- blather blather blather and I say POISON POISON POISON.

You spend all your time on DU promoting POISONING our environment so you can make a living killing the rest of us. You love any chemical no matter what the cost. And of course, you can find some scientist to "prove" you are right and I don't know shit.

I do not have a problem reaching a conclusion even if my science is flawed. I would rather eat shit than risk eating round-up ready crops. I am not going to change my mind. You are not going to change my mind. And acting like you are winning some great debate is bullshit. The consumers that feel as I do don't care about how you twist and distort our positions. All you do is make yourself look suspiciously like you are paid to promote an evil point of view.

I bet you are one of those individuals who believe that DDT should be made legal again.

[Buzz Clik]

10. "Doesn't matter what the science says" Q.E.D.

[Generic Other]

11. Perhaps when there are scientists who operate objectively without political or profit motivation

who can be proven trustworthy, who don't play god with the rest of our lives and the health of our families by experimenting on us when it is clear you know the effects will be hazardous, when scientists don't shill for corporations and lie to us constantly, when you can get your own acts together in ways that are sufficient to convince laypeople you are more competent than the lab rats you test your vile concoctions on, when you prove to me to be better at healing than witchdoctors and sorcerers, that you have more ethics than Dr. Frankenstein and other assorted ghouls in the name of science.

I am not bowing at the altar of your vision of yourself as the zenith of western civilization offering your scientific snake oil to yet another generation of rubes.

And I stand by my statement. The science that the tobacco industry sold us for generations claimed that tobacco was neither harmful nor addictive. That is the science you defend. And it doesn't matter what you say. It isn't worth the piece of paper you wrote it on. Because your arguments do not convince me or anyone else whose opinion matters. Because this is as you know a consumer battle. If consumers reject your science, you and your POISON have no market. That is what you really fear.

So go ahead and mock. Your taunts don't scare me as much as your POISONS and I am willing to withstand your mockery to state my opinion loudly and as often as possible. Because I know if I win so do the bees. And every other living organism whose lives mean so little to Monsanto and evidently to you.

[pansypoo53219]

2. bees are bugs??? WHO KNEW!

[galileoreloaded]

3. bad, bad juju. nt

[wisechoice]

6. anti-science

Anyone asking for more research to be done for the safety of food are anti-science. Pesticides improve yield.
Anyone trying to improve yield using organic farming are wasting time and are anti-science.

[Generic Other]

12. Exactly, because science is paid for by factions

And they expect conclusions that support their beliefs. Yet they get all huffy if someone challenges their veracity?

[Berlum]

13. Merchants of Death, Inc. tried to thwart the ugly truth

as usual.

[Generic Other]

14. Using pseudo-scientific jargon and propaganda

to support or justify their beliefs or worse to sell their questionable products.

I bet a list of all the chemicals we would have been better off without scientists unleashing on the world would circumnavigate the world ten-fold..