Excellent Analysis of New Bee-Dieoff Research by Scottish Beekeeper Graham White
Please see an important article from The Independent Newspaper in London: http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/nature/exclusive-bees-facing-a-...
Very Good Analysis of the data presesnted by Mike McCarthy in The Independent (link above) by Graham White, Bee-keeper, 'Friends of the Bees' - Location: Coldstream, Scottish Borders; Tel: (44) 01890 882 713
By Graham White
Mike McCarthy's article - and his added comments in the newspaper's Opinion Section is an 'exclusive'; this is the first time that an article about the dangers of neonicotinoid pesticides has appeared in such depth in a British newspaper. Moreover, McCarthy has broken the news that the leading research team in the United States, based in the United States Department of Agriculture, and led by Dr. Jeff Pettis, made a fundamental discovery about neonicotinoids more than two years ago, but did not release their findings to the world.
AMERICAN TEAM FOUND THE SMOKING GUN FOR CCD TWO YEARS AGO, BUT DIDN'T PUBLISH?
Dr Pettis' team fed colonies of honeybees with an infinitesimally small amount of Imidacloprid - ( the main neonicotinoid used in the UK) - and then exposed them to a bacterial infection called Nosema. The bees then suffered a much higher level of fatal infection by Nosema than control colonies, which were also deliberately infected, but which were not fed Imidacloprid. To the astonishment of Dr Pettis and his team (in a filmed interview with Mark Daniels at the World Bee Congress in summer 2009) , they were completely unable to detect the imidacloprid toxin in the pathology of the dead bees; even though they knew for a certainty that they had deliberately fed the bees with a carefully calculated dose of the poison. The remains of the neonicotinoid were simply beyond the limits of detection, even using the finest equipment in the world.
Dr Pettis and Dennis van Engelsdorp wrote to me in response to my enquiries (see attached transcript) and stated that this was doubly perplexing, because although they could not detect the insecticide in the bodies of the bees which they had deliberately poisoned with it, they could detect the poison in the nurse bees which fed the larval bees in the hive. There are profound questions raised by this observation, since 'nurse bees' have never left the hive at this point, and could only have come into contact with the pesticides via stored pollen and honey.
These results, confirmed verbally and via email, though still unpublished, duplicate, in a dramatic manner, an almost identical study carried out by Dr Cedric Alaux's team in France (see attached paper) which was published in December 2009.
At a single stroke, both Pettis and Alaux seem to have identified a plausible hypothesis and a possible solution to the mystery of Colony Collapse Disorder, which has killed over three million bee colonies in America, and approaching a million colonies in France, Germany, Italy and Switzerland. So why has nobody told America's bee-keepers?
BACKGROUND TO THE BEE PLAGUE
The deaths of all these billions of bees was correlated in both time and geography with the introduction of the neonicotinoid insecticides in those countries, from the mid 1990s onwards. Imidacloprid was introduced to France around 1994-1996 and was used on a massive scale - on sunflowers, oilseed rape and other crops. Within a year the French had lost 500,000 bee colonies in those areas. Bee-keeping is a massive industry in France, unlike the hobbyist pattern in the UK. Immediately, the French bee-keepers associations were able to commission fully independent research studies on the pathology of the dead colonies, and on the neonicotinoid insecticides which had just started to be used in the areas where the mass-deaths occurred. Dr Bonmatin's team at the University of Montpelier soon reported in 1999, that Imidacloprid in pollen and nectar, had an acute lethal toxicity to bees at doses of just 5 parts per billion. Bayer had claimed in its initial studies submitted as part of its license applications in Europe, that Imidacloprid was only toxic to bees at 5,000 parts per billion; a dose level that bees would never come into contact with in the field. Later studies from the universities of Caen and Metz, as well as the prestigious Pasteur Institute confirmed the extraordinary lethality of neonicotinoids. Imidacloprid is now known to be 7000 times more poisonous to bees than DDT (Tennekes 2010).
The French appointed a top level Committe Scientifique to examine the various studies, and it concluded that the case was proven and Imidacloprid was banned in France in 2000AD; the ban has never been rescinded. However, the Pesticide Safety Directorate in the UK and the Environmental Protection Agency in America - took no notice of the French studies, nor of the neonicotinoid ban; it was business as usual for Bayer in Britain and America.
THE ANATOMY OF A PERFECT CRIME - A POISON THAT LEAVES NO TRACE
Many scientists in Britain and America continued to discount the 'neonicotinoid hypothesis', because the researchers who examined dead CCD colonies could find no trace of these neuro-toxins in the dead bees. What they did find was a host of other pesticides. Maryann Frazier of Pennsylvania State found that some pollen loads being brought into hives contained up to 31 different insecticides, herbicides and fungicides. She also found an average of four different pesticides in an average pollen load brought into the hive by bees. Her research also showed that the mere addition of one herbicide or fungicide to a single neonicotinoid had a 'synergistic effect' which multiplied the toxicity of the poison-cocktail by more than one hundred times. The addition of five or six different pesticides together made the brew many hundreds of times more poisonous.
However, Frazier was baffled because she could barely find a trace of neonicotinoids in any of the dying hives she studied.
But Pettis in America, and Alaux in France, have now demonstrated that an infinitesimal dose of Imidacloprid fed to a bee colony, damages the immune system of the bees in such a way that they become much more susceptible to fatal infections from bacteria, fungal disease and viruses. In fact, CCD colonies exhibit a bewildering explosion of fatal diseases - in a similar manner to which human AIDs victims suffer a multitude of different diseases, but the 'cause' in both cases, is something which destroys the immune system.
Pettis and Alaux, have also shown that, even when they knew that they themselves, had administered the fatal neonicotinoid poison to the bees, they could not detect any trace in the dead insects. The bees eventually died of bacterial Nosema, but both the French team and the American team concluded that it was the neonicotinoid damaging the immune system, which allowed the Nosema infection to take hold.
THE REALITY IN THE FIELD: A WITCHES-BREW OF 40 DIFFERENT PESTICIDES
The final piece of the puzzle of course, is that the French and the American teams only gave the bees one nicotinoid poison, and one bacterial infection - which led to their deaths.
The reality in the field -as Maryann Frazier of Penn State has pointed out - is that the bees are being exposed, not just to neonicotinoid insecticides, but to twenty or thirty additional pesticides, all at the same time: herbicides, fungicides and other insecticides. Moreover, they are not just being exposed to one infectious disease, they are being exposed to dozens of bacteria, fungal diseases and viruses. Taken together we have: a witches brew of pesticides, bees with severely damaged immune systems and a blizzard of infectious viruses, fungal diseases and bacteria, which take together create 'a perfect storm' for bees. They literally have no chance whatever; industrial agriculture has created a farming landscape which is literally 'anti-biotic': 'against all life'. The flowers are poisoned, the pollen is poisoned, the nectar is poisoned, the soil is poisoned, and the water which drains from the soil is poisoned for years at a time.
The biggest mystery of all, however, is that the French team of Dr Alaux carried out their research in 2008 and published their work in December 2009. The American team led by Dr Pettis appear to have also carried out their studies in 2008, and they confirmed independently the findings of the French team. However, unlike the French, they did not publish their results, though they plainly must have understood the enormous implications of their discovery: a possible answer to the mystery of Colony Collapse Disorder.
They have waited more than two years - and have still not published their results. The big question of course is: why did they not publish such a ground-breaking discovery?
"Why would the main American research team, working for the US Department of Agriculture, fail to publish ground-breaking research, which may hold the answer to CCD, for two entire years?"
