Paper cups: A silent killer of India's honeybees?

[nitpicker]

http://www.dw.com/en/paper-cups-a-silent-killer-of-indias-honeybees/a-44302733

Paper cups: A silent killer of India's honeybees?

Date 20.06.2018
Author Sharada Balasubramanian

As Sivagnanam Chandrasekaran sat sipping chai at a small roadside tea stand in southern India, he noticed something unusual: honey bees hovering en masse around discarded paper cups. That might not strike the untrained eye as strange bee behavior. But for Chandrasekaran, a professor of plant biology at Madurai Kamaraj University, it posed some questions: Why were the insects not off flitting from flower to flower instead? Was this an anomaly, or part of a bigger picture? And could this be yet another factor in the important pollinator's decline?

He couldn't find an answer in the existing literature. So the professor and his students set about researching bee foraging in six locations across the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu to figure out what was going on. They found that a considerable population of honeybees visiting these "cup flowers" never returned to their hives. The insects were drowning in the sugary residue of tea, coffee, juices and soft drinks that had attracted them as an alternative food source. Over 30 days, they recorded an alarming 25,211 dead bees in cups at vendor stalls.
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In his research, Chandrasekaran observed that bees will go for the "healthy" choice when presented with the option of flowers or processed sugars. The problem arises when natural flowering habitats shrink and paper cups bloom alongside proliferating beverage stands in growing urban areas.

"After two to three stalls were set up in the same area, if 200 to 300 cups were dumped a day over two to three months, honeybees recognize that as a forage site," said the scientist. The researchers established that a critical mass of sugary cups dumped in an open trash can was a criterion for bee attraction.

A growing awareness of the environmental impact of plastic had prompted a switch to paper cups among vendors over the past few years. Ironically, says Chandrasekaran, this might actually be contributing to bee deaths.

The scientist did not observe any bee mortality in plastic cups during his study. "In paper cups, there is porous substance where sugar stays. This is not present in plastic," said Chandrasekaran. In plastic, the sugary residue hardens instead, he added — although there are no further studies examining the issue.
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[mopinko]

1. life is just so damned strange.