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In a third study, to be published soon in the Bulletin of Insectology, seemingly healthy honey colonies were fed high-fructose corn syrup that had been treated with imidacloprid. Within six months, fifteen out of the sixteen hives that had been given the treated syrup were dead. In commercial beekeeping operations, bees are routinely fed corn syrup, and corn is routinely treated with neonicotinoids.
“I believe one reason that commercial beekeepers are experiencing the most severe Colony Collapse Disorder is because of the link between high-fructose corn syrup and neonicotinoids,” said the lead author of the study, Chensheng Lu, a professor at Harvard. (Bayer CropScience, one of the world’s largest producers of neonicotinoids, has disputed Lu’s paper, as well as the other two.)
Read more: www.newyorker.com...
Every spring millions of bee colonies are trucked to the Central Valley of California and other agricultural areas to replace the wild pollinators, which have all but disappeared in many parts of the country. These bees are routinely fed high-fructose corn syrup instead of their own nutritious honey. And in an effort to boost productivity, the queens are now artificially inseminated, which has led to a disturbing decline in bee genetic diversity. Bees are also dusted with chemical poisons to control mites and other pathogens that have flourished in the overcrowded commercial colonies.
In 1923, Rudolph Steiner, the German founder of biodynamic agriculture, a precursor of the modern organic movement, predicted that within a hundred years artificial industrial techniques used to breed honey bees would lead to the species’ collapse. His prophecy was right on target!
blogs.reuters.com...
It sounds like something out of a science fiction movie — for the past 5 or so years, honeybee populations across the globe have been dying out, and scientists don’t really know why. That is, researchers hope, until now.
A pair of recent studies have pointed to pesticides as the main culprit for Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD), the term scientists use for sudden declines in bee populations. So where are these pesticides coming from? Right inside the hive itself.
Beekeepers use high-fructose corn syrup to supplement hives decanted of honey; since a great deal of American-grown corn is sprayed with neonicotinoids, a class of insecticides, traceable amounts can often be found in the corn syrup.
www.care2.com...
Beekeepers use high-fructose corn syrup to supplement hives decanted of honey; since a great deal of American-grown corn is sprayed with neonicotinoids, a class of insecticides, traceable amounts can often be found in the corn syrup.
Source
The authors, led by Chensheng (Alex) Lu, associate professor of environmental exposure biology in the Department of Environmental Health, write that the new research provides “convincing evidence” of the link between imidacloprid and the phenomenon known as Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD), in which adult bees abandon their hives.
cont...
Lu and his co-authors hypothesized that the uptick in CCD resulted from the presence of imidacloprid, a neonicotinoid introduced in the early 1990s. Bees can be exposed in two ways: through nectar from plants or through high-fructose corn syrup beekeepers use to feed their bees. (Since most U.S.-grown corn has been treated with imidacloprid since 2005, it’s also found in corn syrup.)
more at Source
Originally posted by burntheships
reply to post by SaturnFX
SFX,
After all of my reading, the studys, and the papers, the beekeepers experiences...
it pretty much boils down to a certain class of pesticides...
Neonicotinoids....that is in the GMO corn, its in there in a transgenic form,
and then on top of that the beekeepers have been using corn syrup
in the hives...that is from this transgenic corn.
Sure, all of the other things like cell phones and such are not good for any of us,
but its pretty much nailed to the fence that its the "neonics":
Harvard researchers have literally recreated classic cases of Colony Collapse Disorder by treating bees with minute doses of Bayer's imidacloprid:
Past research has shown that neonicotinoid pesticides, which target insects' central nervous system, do not instantly kill bees. However, to test the effect of even small amounts of these pesticides on western honeybees (Apis mellifera), Harvard researchers treated 16 hives with different levels of imidacloprid, leaving four hives untreated. After 12 weeks, the bees in all twenty hives—treated and untreated—were alive, though those treated with the highest does of imidacloprid appeared weaker. But by 23 weeks everything had changed: 15 out of the 16 hives (94 percent) treated with imidacloprid underwent classic Colony Collapse Disorder: hives were largely empty with only a few young bees surviving. The adults had simply vanished. The hives that received the highest doses of imidacloprid collapsed first. Meanwhile the five untreated hives were healthy.
While authors of previous studies have been cautious about drawing too many conclusions, suggesting that insecticides may be a contributing factor alongside habitat loss, climate change etc—lead author Chensheng (Alex) Lu was more unequivocal, stating that there is clear evidence that imidacloprid and other neonicotinoids are the likely "culprit for Colony Collapse Disorder".
Interestingly, the study also suggests that one of the ways bees are being exposed to imidacloprid may be through high fructose corn syrup which beekeepers have been feeding their colonies for years. U.S. corn began to be sprayed with imidacloprid in 2004-2005, just around the same time that CCD appeared on the scene.
www.treehugger.com...