Purdue university study confirms neonicotinoids on maize killing honeybees

[Gypsi]

Perhaps I was not clear - I wrote it wrong. If all of the apiaries in Indiana and Illinois, and Iowa and Nebraska, if I remember it right (lived there when I was 7) put together a class action lawsuit, could they effectively sue Bayer?

Yes, it would take the kind of testing on every darned hive that was done for the original study. But I've known for a year this product was unsafe for bees.

I planted sweet corn for the first time last year, 3 rows, not a lot, and was back at the feed store asking whether my seed had been treated after I read last year's report on clothianidin. I still have the seed. The only way I'll really know if it is clean is to send it to Texas A&M I suspect. My feed store insists it is, they don't sell treated seeds per the owner. (and my local farmers don't plant much these days. Between the drought and the gas drilling. They run a few cows. I AM the local farmer, with 1/3 of an acre.)

Gypsi

[Scrapfe]

.... If all of the apiaries in Indiana and Illinois, and Iowa and Nebraska... put together a class action lawsuit, could they effectively sue Bayer?...

(IMHO) No, not unless they bribe a majority of the judges at every level of the justice system. Since it is common for every cent recovered by class action law suits to go to legal fees, bribery is a viable option.

Class action suits are usually a scam. The lawyers sue, the food companies agree to pay or else they fight. Either way the lawyers fatten up at the publics' expense while the food companies sued advance the price of food to either fatten or employ a new crop of lawyers. Meanwhile we end up eating more and more Chinese rice, fresh apple juice, and processed foods. It really is a vicious cycle and this cycle is the only " sustainable " thing happening now in American agriculture.

[Scrapfe]

... I planted sweet corn for the first time last year, 3 rows, not a lot…

Please don't take my words the wrong way, but 1 year of experience growing 3 rows of sweet corn on 1/3 of an acre will not qualify anyone as an expert agriculture whiteness, anymore than squeezing a zit qualifies me to perform plastic surgery.

…and was back at the feed store asking whether my seed had been treated after I read last year's report on clothianidin. The only way I'll really know if it is clean is to send it to Texas A&M...

Bone up on the differences between DENT corn and SWEET corn verities.

…my local farmers don't plant much these days…

If your local farmers don't plant much these days have you ever wondered or asked why? Could it be that more and more of the food (even organic food) on the grocery store shelves these days comes from China or other former Third World Countries? Aren't these the same countries whose starving children used to appear on the NBC Nightly News with flies crawling on their faces? But these former Third World Countries are now well fed and growing and selling us more and more of the food we eat because we are unable to grow it here and sell it at the prevailing World Price.

Why is that? Don't we still have plentiful rain, dirt, and Sunshine in this country?

...I AM the local farmer, with 1/3 of an acre...

Unless I treat it as a tax dodge I can’t keep body and soul together little less eek out a living by legally dirt farming what is in effect a 70 X 200 foot subdivision lot. Try it yourself for 5 years without any savings or other outside sources of income and show us how it‘s done. I am betting that you come away from the experience with a new found respect for pesticides and the role they play in agriculture. Either way it would make one heck of a reality TV program, you just can't get paid for doing it.

[spunky]

I have been beekeeping 6 yrs now. I live on 2 acres here in Indiana surronded on all 4 sides by bean and corn fields. Bees gotta fly at least 1/4 mile to hit a small pasture /woods and water in one direction 1/2 to 3/4 mile in the others. I have lost hives for 2 reasons as far as I can tell. One, is starvation, my fault ,and second was a freak january storm which which blew apart 2 hives that were 3 yrs old apiece. I have planted sweet corn in my garden in the same spot for 5 yrs , about 10 feet away from 1 hive stand, and I dont treat my yard with chemicals to kill any dandelions. JM2 cents

[wildbranch2007]

Mike,

I call BS on your source. No plants anywhere near that much corn seed per acre.

Tom

didn't really read it but I guess people are correct all kinds of odd information out there. from a university
down south.
Aim for a population of 14,000 for fields without irrigation and 22,000 for irrigated fields. This should be between 10 and 15 pounds of seed per acre. More plants per acre may not increase the number of ears, since crowded stalks sometime will not produce ears.

[Acebird]

Why is that? Don't we still have plentiful rain, dirt, and Sunshine in this country?

It's the dirt that is questionable and the equipment used to grow food today is no longer designed to work the dirt. The equipment is designed to plant acres and acres of one plant species or deposit tons and tons of poisons. Third world countries don't have this equipment. I haven't seen much organic food coming from China unless you are talking about honey. Nobody believes China produces anything organic. They learned from us and they are polluting their air, land and water at a phenomenal rate.

[Gypsi]

Unless I treat it as a tax dodge I can’t keep body and soul together little less eek out a living by legally dirt farming what is in effect a 70 X 200 foot subdivision lot. Try it yourself for 5 years without any savings or other outside sources of income and show us how it‘s done. I am betting that you come away from the experience with a new found respect for pesticides and the role they play in agriculture. Either way it would make one heck of a reality TV program, you just can't get paid for doing it.

I never said I made my living off my 1/3 of an acre by farming, but I buy fewer and fewer groceries each year, and I've been here for 10 years. And it is approximately a 130x130 subdivision lot with good soil (they didn't terraform it and truck off the top soil).

The chickens eat the weeds and bugs (and bees if I'm not careful), they also eat the tomatoes that split, surplus cantaloupe, watermelon, and part of the greens, but mainly I feed me and supplement 3 daughters and 3 grandchildren. Fertilizer comes from chicken manure a little, but mostly fish pond waste, composted, (if chemicals were used in the pond, it does not go to the regular garden), I do have to add magnesium and potash because my fish waste is too high in nitrogen. I've been here 10 years. I am NOT qualified to speak on agriculture. And my local farmers who aren't planting have been in a record breaking drought. I saw corn 2 miles away last year, it burned up long before harvest. I turned off the water to mine as soon as the ears were edible size. Incredibly high water usage for not much to eat.

I do make my living off my land. I raise ornamental fish and aquatic plants. The rest is just to feed me, and the bees are helpful, but aside from tomatoes, not truly necessary.

My main pesticides are dish soap and DE. Fish and pesticides do NOT mix. (use tea tree oil for pond plants with aphids)

I would surely HOPE that judges do not have to be bought to give beekeepers a fair shake. IF I had an unexplained bee loss and lived next to a corn patch, I'd be contacting A&M and having my bees tested. I guess those impacted will have to decide.

Gypsi

[sqkcrk]

Why is that? Don't we still have plentiful rain, dirt, and Sunshine in this country?

Actually NO. Rainfall and sunshine, I guess. Though watertables in many parts of the country are down.

Aerible land is paved over and used for new houses every day. The land best suited for growing food is also quite highly prized for and bought by those who wish to build houses and live there.

Case in point are apple orchards in Peru, NY, Clinton Co., south of Plattsburgh, which when the Orchard went bankrupt, the Bank holding the debt auctioned off the land. The other Orchard owners couldn't compete w/ the price others were willing to pay. A lot of that one orchard now stands unused, a source of disease and pests for the neighboring orchards. Much of it is in houses too.

One orchard I pollinate for wanted to buy some cleared land across the road so they could expand their orchard. Again, the price is too high to invest in for growing apples.

So, my point is were don't have the "dirt" which we used to. I'm sure you meant soil, right?

[Nabber86]

From the cited OP – “the amount of clothianidin on a single maize seed {is} 0.5 mg/kernel.”

From this source (Iowa State) we get 34,000 corn seeds per acre (mid-point on Table 3):
http://www.extension.iastate.edu/pub...ons/pm1885.pdf

0.5 mg/kernel x 34,000 kernels per acre = 17,000 mg clothianidin per acre, or only 17 grams. That’s not a whole lot of pesticide.

Then that 17,000 mg of clothianidin is distributed over 34,000 corn plants and surface soil.
1 acre = 43,560 square feet. Let’s assume that the upper 1 inch of soil is contaminated with 50 percent of the 17,000 mg clothianidin per acre. Therefore:

Volume of soil = 43,560 sf x 0.083 ft = 3,630 cubic feet

Soil weights about 120 pounds per cubic foot, so 3,630 cf x 120 pcf = 435,600 pounds, or 197,585 kg.

50 percent of 17,000 mg per acre = 8,500 mg clothianidin per acre,
8,500 mg clothianidin / 197,585 kg soil = a clothianidin soil concentration of 0.043 mg/kg, or 43,020 ng/kg.

If the lethal dose of clothianidin for a bee is 22 ng, so a bee would have to eat about 0.5 grams of soil to die (22 ng/43,020 ng/kg x 1000 mg per kg). An average bee weights around 200 mg, so drum roll please ………….that bee would have to eat over twice it’s weight in contaminated soil in order to die.

I didnt know bees ate that much soil.

[sqkcrk]

I didn't know that bees ate soil at all. Maybe that's where they get their vitamins?

[Gypsi]

We have more unoccupied buildings (mostly commercial) than anywhere I have seen in the country, yet there is another brand new Aldi's taking over some more land that will open up next month. The "I love NY" theme for tourism will be turning into "Come visit our parking lot Monuments" instead of our scenery and wildlife.

They have been doing the same in Texas. A virtual wasteland of unoccupied grocery stores and industrial buildings, but carving up the countryside for more, more more. I've got a lot of open land around me. I should be playing the lottery, because one day they will run out of prime spots, and right now it is only about $30K an acre here. If I don't buy it, I may be surrounded by a suburb.

[jim lyon]

The conversion of prime farm ground to suburbia and highways with ridiculously wide medians is horribly shortsighted. I suppose this has to be a local decision but we need to take a lesson from Europeans where land is by necessity highly prized and agricultural land is rarely taken out of production.

[Gypsi]

we have to have those ridiculously wide medians to accommodate traffic at 70+ mph as we rush, rush rush to meet our deadlines and print fake money that is meaningless. I checked my math. At $10K per 1/6th acre lot that I wanted and someone else bought 2 years ago, adjacent to mine, that is $60K an acre. I'm kinda in favor of a bit more recession and americans getting hungry and realistic, but don't tell anyone.

[Barry]

Let's get back to honeybees.

[TWall]

Takes a couple nanograms to kill a bee so this "dose" can kill 100,000,000 bees.

Peter,

The point is not whether neonics are toxic to bees. Neonics are used in crop production and are in the environment. The question is are the bees exposed, how are the bees exposed and how much are they exposed to.

The cited study identified a new, to me at least, potential pathway to bee exposure through dust exhausted from the vacuum system. The study did not identify is this increased bee exposure. The study did find dead bees with clothiandin in/on them. But, they were not able to determine how the exposure occurred since they tested while the remaining fields were in tassel. So the question still remains were the bees exposed from pollen? Or, from planting? Or, both?

Considering the amount of neonics used throughout the country if bees were exposed as many fear they are most colonies would have been dead a long time ago. That said, figuring out how the actual exposure takes place will help to determine how to best protect the bees.

Tom

[oldreliable]

So what does this report mean to us? I am surrounded by corn fields, cow corn mostly for silage. Will this report get other universities looking in this direction, I would hope they have been anyway
after the ban in Europe. Does this mean we will see a ban in Neo-cides here? I could move my bees out of here during planting season, that may help but its not a fix. The U.S. gov may do something about it in 2020 but what do we do until then?

ban? are you kidding me...with the pliticians we have today and the lobbyist and self interest groups running the country now you can expect $$ and farm wants to trump environment and bees needs..

[Nabber86]

Peter,

Considering the amount of neonics used throughout the country if bees were exposed as many fear they are most colonies would have been dead a long time ago. That said, figuring out how the actual exposure takes place will help to determine how to best protect the bees.

Tom

Exactly. It's called exposure and risk assessment. In my calculation the amount clothianidin would be 17,000 mg per acre. That's like one half of an ounce, but as pointed out that's enough to kill millions of bees. BUT the clothianidin isnt just dumped in a pile and a million bees proceed to ingest it. It's spread out over an acre of land and ends up at a low enough concentration that a bee would have to ingest an enormous amount of dirt (relative to a bee) to receive a toxic dose. Last time I checked, bees dont eat dirt.

If the route of exposure is claimed to be fugitive dust landing on nearby flowers, the clothianidin is even further diluted in the air, and then even further diluted as the pollen falls on a flower, and even further diluted as only a percentage of contaminated dust would stick to a pollen grain or incorporate into the flower nectar. The route of exposure may be complete, but the dose isnt there.

[Joseph Clemens]

In reading that last post, I can't help but think, "I don't really care how low the dose is, I don't appreciate any quantity of poison in my body or in my bees, especially any that I didn't intend to put there, myself or in my bees."

I don't know about your bees, but my bees collect nectar and pollen, and concentrate these items inside their hives.

How much cyanide or other poison would you subject your livestock to, even if you were sure it were a less than lethal dose?

[sqkcrk]

In Bee Culture this month Kathy Kellison writes in her article "One Colony, One Acre", "Consider this- France, a country comparable in size to California, supports approximately 2.3 million managed colonies, which is nearly the same as the 2.4 million in the U.S."

So, seems like we aught to be able to have more beehives here than in France. It must be the economics. Don't ya think? It's not economically viable for enuf people?

Keith Delaplane's article illustrates some of these problems too.

[Nabber86]

In reading that last post, I can't help but think, "I don't really care how low the dose is, I don't appreciate any quantity of poison in my body or in my bees, especially any that I didn't intend to put there, myself or in my bees."

I don't know about your bees, but my bees collect nectar and pollen, and concentrate these items inside their hives.

How much cyanide or other poison would you subject your livestock to, even if you were sure it were a less than lethal dose?

Bad comparison. Clothianidin isnt very toxic (cyanide is about 5,000 times more toxic). To put it in to perspective,you would have to eat about 100 grams of clothianidin to die while only 100 mg of cyanide will do you in. There is more than a few nanograms of cyanide in you body right now. Do you ever eat almonds or spinach? They contain cyanide.

Of course most people respond to these examples by saying something like the cyanide in almonds is "natural" so it's OK. As if "natural" is way less toxic "un-natural cyanide".

Anyway, like Paracelsus said in the 16th century, "The dose makes the poison".