Legend has it that Einstein said that when the bees disappear, the humans will be gone in four years. Well, the bees are disappearing. According to BBC News, billions of honeybees have disappeared over the last few years, and colonies have collapsed from the U.S. and Canada to Europe to Japan. This alarming trend involves a lot more than honey. Bees pollinate almond, blueberry, and apple crops, and most fruit and vegetable crops. They are responsible for up to $14 Billion in seeds and crops annually, according to a Cornell University study. Someone once said that we owe every third bite we eat to the honeybee.
People have conjectured global warming, and all kinds of explanations, but I think the problem is pesticides. We all know that nicotine kills. It is a powerful natural insecticide, a neurotoxin that acts on the nervous system of its ingester. Bayer developed a neonicotinoid, an insecticide that acts very much like nicotine and that is very widely used because of its effectiveness. They are highly toxic to insects, causing paralysis, but relatively safe for mammals. Because nicotinoids are sytemic they are absorbed into the plant itself, making all parts of it toxic, not just the surface, since they don't just sit on the surface. So bees, butterflies, whatever visitors partake of the plant's nectar will take in some of the poison each time they visit. And they visit scores of times. They are the collateral damage from killing the pests.
Right now Bayer's product, called imidacloprid, remains on the market despite the more than 100 scientific studies that have been published showing its dangers. But concern is rising across Europe, and Europe is beginning to ban all nicotinoids and neonicotinoids.
Europe is not alone in having pesticide problems that may be contributing to the decline in the population of bees over the last decade. Wikileaks has leaked a document to a Colorado beekeeper revealing that the EPA had knowledge of the dangers of nicotinoids and neonictinoids, but chose to pretend they didn't.
Clothianidin, made by Bayer, has already been banned in Germany, France and many other countries, but the US continues to turn a blind eye and the bee population, which is of course not the target of the insecticide, continues to shrink, and with it our food supply. And the EPA knows. They know.
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