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scientist studies on gmo and roundup

14K views 90 replies 27 participants last post by  Baja 
#1 ·
i am looking for factual studies on gmo and roundup ready products in relation to bees. can anyone point me the right direction. my personal studies having concluded they will cause harm. but without a degree or government backing.. no one listens. thanks in advance. dennis
 
#2 ·
The very best evidence is from commercial bee keepers who make their living in the middle of neonic, Roundup and GMO country. They will pretty much all tell you it has never in their life been as good as it is today for making honey. Specific to GMOs and Roundup they have all kinds of spring flowers in those treated fields today that they did not have before GMOs and Roundup and the result is spring build ups that are the best they have ever seen. I am talking about guys whose hives are surrounded by tens of thousands of acres of corn and beans in places like Ill and IA. So, not only is Roundup ready corn and beans an absolute boon for preserving and building soil quality and increasing the water storage capacity of soils there is no field evidence of harm to bees or humans. Everyone who works on farms knows this. The problem is only a couple of % of our population works on farms and has the slightest clue of how much better the environment is today versus only 20 years ago. A significant problem in farm country is our government going hog wild mowing and sometimes spraying ditches to make them look like lawns. This is recent and has destroyed a lot of wonderful honey bee capacity, not to mention the total disaster it has been for monarch butterflies. I will remind you that monarchs are 100% dependent on milk weeds. Milk weed never grew in fields to any significant extent. Try digging some and transplanting it and you will learn real fast why cultivation is simply death to milk weed. It has always been a ditch and fence row plant. The fence rows went away 50 years ago, way before Roundup and GMOs.
 
#4 ·
That is really funny. You have no idea how much I dislike Monsanto, nor that I have disliked them this much since likely before you were even born.

Exactly what do you think Roundup and GMOs kill? Roundup is very good at killing annuals and non woody perennials that have fairly short root systems. In fact the formulation additives in Roundup are more toxic to insects and mammals than the active ingredient. The active is roughly as toxic on an acute basis as table salt. The GMO corn that includes the BT genes is pretty good at killing insects that feed on that corn. Feeding studies have clearly shown that the toxin has for practical purposes no toxicity to humans. To humans it is simply another protein source.

But, as long as your mind is made up there is there any purpose in talking about the real world? Just for the record I am a real scientist. Like PhD and a life time doing R&D on all kinds of products the vast majority having nothing to do with GMOs or Monsanto. I have authored a whole bunch of professional papers and have a couple of patents. I am retired now but still doing science with my own money and have a professional publication in the works right now. I have never worked for Monsanto and would never in my life even consider working for them personally. I have hired scientists away from Monsanto and that is as close as my association to the company has ever been. What are your credentials to make you an expert?

Just for the record most anything will kill you if you abuse it. Cars kill a bunch of people every single year. Pesticides kill zero people every year except for suicides. Did you know it is perfectly possible to sit down and drink enough water to kill yourself? It is possible and people have done it.

If I use the standard definition for GMO, namely an organism that has DNA incorporated into its chromosomes that did not come from its parents but came from some other species, did you know that YOU are a GMO product. As is every other person over age two or three. Did you know that some 25% or 30% of the DNA in cattle was transferred directly from snakes to cattle and therefore every steak you ever eat is partly snake and by any definition cattle are all GMO? Nature has been in the GMO business now for well over 3 billion years. Every food you eat is GMO and always has been. So get used to it.
 
#5 ·
Not as emphatic as Mr. Cryberg, but in general I agree. GMO beans and corn surround me where I sit now. Pretty much all of the corn and beans around here are GMO. Bees don't seem to mind. Last year my bees did a lot of work in the nearest soybean field.
 
#14 ·
600 give or take. Bee yards I have in/near ag fields do better then bees I have in the hills. You can look at satellite imagery of my location and see that everything south of Frankfort is mostly hills and woods, north is beans and corn. North of Frankfort yards do better then southern yards every year on productivity and winter survivability. Doing my own study and research I have found that GMO and round-up actually benefits honey bees. I literally loaded up bees from the hills this year to purposely move them into soybean fields. I have never seen a pesticide kill or colony collapse disorder.
 
#13 ·
Monsanto is a leading producer of genetically engineered (GE) seed and Roundup, a glyphosate-based herbicide. Monsanto has agreed to accept Bayer's offer to purchase the company for $66 billion ($128/share) in September 2016, and the deal is currently pending regulatory approval.https://actions.sumofus.org/a/bayer-bees-lawsuit Bayer sueing "Save the Bees org"
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-06-30/bayer-and-syngenta-face-pressure-over-pesticides-after-bee-study Bayer facing pressure over pesicides after bee study.

Realistically can we fight big companies and actually win? Some say yes and some say no. What matters I believe is that we don't sit on the sidelines. Be pro active if that's your wish. I personally never looked at the chemical market as "HOLY COW" that's a lot of pesticides at the big box stores until I was a bee keeper. The most good that I have done as a pro active bee keeper not going after the source of the problem being the large corporations is that my voice says a lot in educating anyone that cares to listen. That being that just putting any fertilizer or spraying anything poisonous has it's problems. Neighbor puts fertilizer, weed killer and poison on grass. Then sprays poison for general purpose for bugs. Overwaters in the AM. Bees drink that water and later on a bee hive dies from the poisoned water. I am not saying it happened to me personally, but I have known this is possible. Just one instance of a possibility. It all starts with educating the general public. I believe that just with a little bit of information that the general public will understand that nature is indeed in balance and when you turn the balance to either side more problems occur.
 
#16 ·
A significant problem in farm country is our government going hog wild mowing and sometimes spraying ditches to make them look like lawns.
Dick ( Richard Cryberg) this is the problem here making many species extinct.

I remember posting a link which explained that the chemicals are accumulating in the flowers nearby a sprayed field via air drifting , the amount of chemicals being much higher there.

Do you have any experience concerning this? If you are a farmer in germany law says to provide such blooming field stripes near your fields as a compensation.
 
#22 ·
Sybil, Drift can be a problem. But, the real question is what is drifting? Some of the older pesticides were far more persistent than most of what is used today as well as being far more toxic to non target species. Things like paraquat were simply horrid. Going from paraquat to Roundup to dry down crops was a major step in protecting not only the environment but also people. We have a ways to go yet. For instance many of the dicamba formulations have drift/volitility issues that are not good and are causing problems. Personally I can not get a bit bothered by the levels of things like neonics and Roundup, phenoxys and Garlon found in drift situations. They simply are no place close to high enough to ever be a human health issue.
 
#18 · (Edited)
Not really. I know about the pro and cons and IMHO it´s the mixtures and the doses of chemicals which are probably dangerous.

What interests me more are the buffer zones.

For many years now I collected weeds and wild plants to eat or make tea of. They were always easy to find, even without being near a sprayed field. All this weeds in rural areas they were blooming and always I saw bees on them.
Now the rural areas are "managed" which means they are mowed or sprayed. You are happy to find some goldenrod.

The compensation are the planted buffer zones. And I read that these have a much higher chemical input than the fields, or, maybe they bloom and the bees are on them not on the fields.

Our fields are harvested ( clover) mostly before blooming, they are used for silage. The blooming fields are an exception, but rape and some fertilization plants are still there.

Some people argue, with roundup used the wild bees have more open soil for nesting. Kind of cynical, if the flow is killed and the wild bees starve.

To CCD:
Indeed, most experts agree that the cause was likely multifactoral, citing a combination of stressors that include pests and pathogens, disease, nutrition, genetics, environmental exposures and commercial bee hive management practices.
Glyphosat could be more dangerous to humans than insects. Let´s see what future brings.
 
#23 ·
Do you know enough about global warming to even have a right to have an opinion? I doubt it. Did you know for instance that the models on global warming all say that carbon dioxide in the atmosphere below an altitude of about 15,000 meters has zero impact on temperatures? I bet you did not know that. Do you understand the equation dI/(dC x dL) = kI? If you do not understand that equation you know exactly zero about global warming. For the record I can understand things like the theory of relativity as it is so simple even a high school kid can understand it. I can do much of the math involved in quantum mechanics and understand why the math says a small object can be in two places at the same time just like experiment shows. But, global warming is much too hard for me to understand so I have no opinion if the observed warming is man driven or not. But, anyone who denies the world has warmed over the last 50 years is truly delusional. It would be hard to randomly pick a 50 year period in the last 10,000 years and not see some warming or cooling.
 
#24 ·
I would think location and what is grown makes a difference in ones experience. Statements of what one sees in their yards doesn't mean the same is seen in a completely different. I see that moving my bees from an agricultural area to a more natural setting the bees do better. Not enough food due to the over use of herbicides.
 
#25 ·
After this event,

https://www.welt.de/wissenschaft/ar...fuer-mysterioeses-Bienensterben-geklaert.html

when a nicotinoid was used in a wrong way with wrong technique .

The farmers and beekeepers try to be co-workers now.
This means that fruit trees and fields are sprayed when no hives are near and no bees foraging and a new technique is used for sowing.
Since then the beekeepers have less losses and the farmers more harvest. So there must be an impact on the bees.
I´m talking about my location, I´m not aware what happens in the rest of germany.

Here the bees starve in a more natural setting, they need the agricultural environment.

Dick, you are right about the chemicals once used. DDT or other insecticides were used extensively and today the chemicals are much more controlled.
 
#26 ·
For many years now, daily temperatures have been recorded at most places on the globe. So for most people, if they know where to look, would be able to see what daily temperatures where they live have been, going back the last 30 years, or in many cases a lot longer than that.

So establishing global warming has not been difficult. With a big enough computer, temperature data can be collected from thousands of places all over the globe, added up and averaged, and shows the average temperature of the planet is getting warmer. This is not in doubt it is simple maths.

The debate, if one can call it that, is not if the world is getting hotter, but the why. Is it just cyclical as has happened in the past, or is it man made? To attempt to answer this question, data is collected on the things man can influence, such as atmospheric gases that trap warmth from the sun, and how much of that is there because humans made it by mining and burning fossil fuels. Various types of scientific geeks collect and analyse this data, look for correlations, and do a bunch of other stuff, then attempt to determine how much of global warming is down to us.

Some big business, such as oil and coal, can do better in the short term if they can convince enough people that global warming is "fake news". Some politicians can also get better results short term by denying the need to do anything that might cost, to protect the planet. Some of them knowingly, and there are some who probably just don't get it themselves.
 
#27 ·
Getting off topic but here in Aus there has been a bit of a uproar about the Bureau Meteorology modifying historical temperature records. Some of these records go back over 100 years and were lowered because they were outside what was expected as normal max temp. In the last few weeks we have discovered the BoM system has been disregarding temperatures this winter below a certain point as they fall outside what is expected as the normal minimum range for the location.
 
#29 ·
Why is a good question. Who gave the directive is a good question. I have not seen answers to either. But, what is absolutely 100% clear is what 220 posted is correct and a matter of public record. The data was flat out fudged. It may not sound plausible to you but it is a fact anyhow. I do not see why you do not find it plausible. Lots of bee research has been fudged and still gets published. Just a month ago there was all kinds of discussion on a publication where less than 10 cherry picked observations out of some 250 total observations were used to draw a conclusion that was statistical nonsense. The authors used experimental noise in the data to get the conclusion they wanted to get from the experiments. Or was it 150 total observations? Thing was such a joke I have forgotten the details.

Dick
 
#30 ·
I have no idea who authorised the changes, most of those revised down were from the late 18th early 19th century. The explaination as I understand it is that they are outside the statistical norm and that changes in the way temperature is read means they could be out by a degree or 2c so they were revised down.
My understanding of the current disregarding of low temps is that it was due to automation of most weather stations. The programs they run have a built in min/max temp range and anything outside the pre decided temps is disregarded as an error.
 
#38 ·
Why would there not be such fast warming in the past if it were not man made?
There are numerous periods where earth's temperatures changed faster and more than has happened in the last 40 years. About 1000 years ago it was also warmer than it is today by a couple of degrees and 250 years ago it was a couple of degrees colder than it is today. We have excellent temp records year by year for the last 10,000 years and can see numerous times of sudden temperature change world wide. In fact, the head climate guy at East Anglia, Phil Jones, said in a public presentation to the BBC that the rate of warming for the periods of 1860 to 1880, 1920 to 1940 and 1975 to 2005 all had identical slopes.

Does any of this mean carbon dioxide does not matter? Of course not. But, I do think when people talk about the history of global temperatures they really should tell the truth and admit that by itself the last 40 years are well within the normal range for both absolute temperature as well as rate of change in temperature compared to history. I also thing Australia and others including the US should stop fudging the data to make it show some desired conclusion. I think the US leaving the Paris accord was really stupid. Why leave when staying costs you zero and keeps the conversation going smoothly? Besides, we all know no one is going to cut carbon dioxide emissions anyhow. Things like electric cars and solar power generate more carbon dioxide than simply burning fossil fuels to get around or to light your home. And do not even get me started on the negative consequences of burning ethanol as fuel. From an environmental standpoint this is about the dumbest idea ever dreamed up.
 
#32 ·
In earth history these climate changes were always happening and there is no evidence that it´s man made now.

But in a short time man used so many resources that we will have to change our attitudes or change our way of living ( or need another planet).

Since the population of the world still increases and no one wants to downshift I see a possibility of change in technology or science.

Still, it will not be enough. Pests and disease or natural catastrophes must eliminate mankind to save the earth.
 
#34 ·
A NASA consens? Interesting.

The governments invented a CO2 problem, which is very profitable.

But all other factors of climate change are ignored. Sun activity? Rain forests extinct? Radiowaves of cellphones and computers? Airplane traffic? Agriculture technologies?.........
 
#35 ·
A NASA consens? Interesting.

The governments invented a CO2 problem, which is very profitable.?.........
Wow.
You surely have some strange ideas. Not only in beekeeping.

But all other factors of climate change are ignored. Rain forests extinct? Radiowaves of cellphones and computers? Airplane traffic? Agriculture technologies?.........
I thought those were man made.
 
#37 ·
you have proved my point lol.. most scientist are used to milk out more money for socialist programs .. global warming is a hoax and a lot of real scientist are coming out and telling the truth on it now. no such thing.. and you wonder why I question all studies done by scientist on phophates... if it doesn't make cents their is a buck in it.. those who promote global warming have bats in their belfry.. one brick shy of a load... retards.... lol
 
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