What Is Killing America’s Bees and What Does It Mean for Us?
And the truth of the matter is that the world right now isn’t the friendliest place for bees, even with pesticides out of the picture. Since the 1980s, honeybees have been preyed on by a nasty little blood-sucking, disease-spreading mite known as the varroa destructor, and thus have to contend with the miticides beekeepers apply to hives (miticides, mind you, that have the tricky task of killing one bug that literally lives on another). Meanwhile, there’s a plethora of new bee pathogens emerging at warp speed, plus ever-shrinking habitats and the aforementioned stresses of a migratory lifestyle. All of which is why entomologists like Dennis vanEngelsdorp, who was part of the group that gave colony collapse disorder its name, caution against assigning just one cause to what is no doubt a complex problem. Certainly, each of these issues exacerbates the others: A hungry, stressed-out bee will be more susceptible to toxins, and eating neonics has been shown to cause bees to eat less. (In fact, a recent study published in Nature showed that rather than avoiding neonics, as had been hypothesized, bees actually prefer them — they are related to nicotine, after all.)
“Bees are tanking, and this has all kinds of consequences for the ecosystem,” says one advocate. “And we’re doing more studies?”
Despite all these factors, Doan and many others feel strongly that neonicotinoids were the final stressor in a cascade of them, and the one that tipped the scales — and that discussion of other potential causes deflects attention away from neonics, which chemical companies are at pains to do. At the very least, the industry — particularly Bayer and Syngenta, the major manufacturers of neonics — doesn’t dispel the confusion. They argue that there are more hives in America now than there were five years ago (which is true, but only because beekeepers constantly have to divide their colonies to make up for losses); that bees are thriving in a sea of neonic-infused canola in Canada (“If someone’s pointing you to a study and saying, ‘Look, it shows no harm,’ you might want to see if it’s a canola field,” says Lori Ann Burd, the environmental health director at the Center for Biological Diversity. “For whatever reason, honeybees seem to experience significantly less harm in canola fields than in other fields”); and that any study that sees significant harm to bees after neonic dosing had methodological errors or used too high a dose. “The basic principle of toxicology and risk assessment is ‘the dose makes the poison,'”says David Fischer, the chief bee researcher at Bayer CropScience. “Or to put it another way, all substances are toxic, but what differentiates a poison from a remedy is the dose.”
Industry scientists emphasize that no one cause can explain the bee die-offs. “I don’t think that we can deny that if a bee is exposed to a pesticide, there’s not stress there,” says Jay Overmyer, technical lead of Syngenta’s Ecological Risk Assessment. “But it all goes back to the fact that there are multiple stressors, and they all have to be taken into consideration.”
To assess how, or how much, neonics affect bees, many look to Europe, where the neonic ban has been in place for almost two years; yet the ban’s outcome is still inconclusive, in part because of the persistence of the chemicals. Studies have shown that neonics can persist in the ground for years and that some neonic compounds break down into substances even more toxic than the parent product.
This past January, a task force of 29 independent scientists reported that they had reviewed more than 800 recent, peer-reviewed studies on systemic insecticides and determined that sublethal effects of neonics are very, very bad for bees indeed. But Fischer, the scientist at Bayer — which reportedly made $262 million in sales of the neonic clothianidin in 2009 alone — says that he doesn’t see the study as being objective and that Bayer’s research shows the opposite. ”This is an inherent problem because it’s very easy to spin these things in a million directions,” says Greg Loarie, a staff attorney for Earthjustice. “There are ways in which you can downplay the negative and prejudice the outcome.” In fact, the greatest indication of what a study will find is often who is conducting or financing it. (A press contact at Syngenta sent me studies that ostensibly showed that neonics were not harming bees: The first was conducted by Syngenta employees; the second was funded by Bayer.)