I attended a seminar by Dr Paul Cross as he discussed the collapse of the bee populations, its cause, and why it may not be over.
In 2006 near entire hives began disappearing overnight, with no sign of where they had gone, causing massive damage to the apiarists all over the world. This was called ‘Colony Collapse Disorder’ (CCD).
Many have worked to discover the cause of CCD, with the 3 main factors being: lice, nycema virus, and the true culprit, Pesticides; specifically the group Neonicitinoids (Neonics).
One of the worst qualities of neonics, is their ability to travel through the soil and be taken up by wild plants nearby to sites where they are used, as well as binding to the soil so that it’s half-life may exceed 1000 days.
During tests it was found that 1 gram of neonics (approx. the contents of a teabag) is enough to kill outright over 250 million bees. By 2002 20,000 tonnes of neonics were sold worldwide, enough to kill:
- 5,000,000,000,000,000,000 bees (5 quintillion)
- 142,000,000,000,000 bee hives (142 trillion)
- 142,857 planets worth of bees… And we wonder why they’ve disappeared.
Direct Lethal Effects Of Neonics Are Not The Main Issue.
Despite the absurdly high kill rate of neonics, it is their ‘Sub-lethal’ affects that are the most damaging and the cause of CCD. These are affects that don’t kill the bee outright.
Using brand new technology, designed by Paul Cross and PhD students at Bangor University, they tracked bees, from 2 food sources (sugar water), one of which was infected with neonics.
They found that any bees who drank from the neonic infected food, became unable to navigate, and were unable to make their way back the hive; likely succumbing to starvation or exposure.
But with the new bee tracking technology becoming more advanced and effective every year, it shouldn’t be too long before we can determine the ultimate cause of death.
Now To End With Both Good And Bad News.
The good news is that neonics are now illegal. And given 5-6 years they will have broken down in the soil and have minimal to no effect. However a new pesticide, ‘Sufluxoflore’, is now entering the public domain, and it has already been shown to be just as toxic and harmful to bees and the ecosystem as Neonicitinoids.
We will undoubtedly now have years more of damage to our ecosystem, because of poor management of pesticides, and in my opinion this shows the dire need for change in governmental policy to help reduce and ban the use of non-specific pesticides.
The Harm we have done to our environment is astonishing.
With the use of pesticides, fertilizer run off, and greenhouse gases, I think this seminar showed the amount of damage we are doing without even realising we are doing it, and this lecture really inspired me to look into work in some kind of sector of conservation, be that managing conservation sites, or by working on research to bring an end to such damaging methods as unspecific pesticides.
This research (to my knowledge) has not been published but there are other spaces where you can read more about neonicitinoids and bees [1], [2], [3], [4]. But don’t forget to also try and attract bees to your garden, and maybe together we can help encourage the population to grow again [1], [2], [3], [4].
– Lukas Edwards, 13th February 2020
Biology Express: Zoology 