Neonicotenoids are a serious problem alright and there is worldwide alarm.It is not just bees but all pollinators copping it The concentrating effect in nectar and pollen many miles from the source due to drift is amazing.Colony collapse is more about this stuff than mites or foreign bees.Organophosphates that they replaced due to lower vertebrate and especially mammalian toxicity never caused this level of concern.GMO bees that an handle neonicotenoids will never be produced as the D-loop metabolism is obligatory in insects.
1) First off, colony collapse disorder has been overblown in the popular imagination. The average rate of winter colony loss changed from the norm of about 15% to about 30% at the peak of the "disorder". It's hardly the sort of bee apocalypse that most people picture.
2) What do beekeepers do when they lose a colony? They buy another new colony, a queen and a handful of drones. Where do these come from? Breeders; bees can be induced to produce almost limitless new queens by certain management practices, and the drones that need to accompany her are only a small fraction of the total of the hive. Because it's so easy to make new queens, there will never be a fundamental threat to bees, even if the rate of winter colony loss was 95%.
3) Honeybees aren't even native to the US. They're only needed for pollination because of the unfortunate monoculture practices adopted widespread in farming - everything in the area blooms at once and then there's little food for pollinators for the rest of the year, there's little to no refuge, and so on, so native pollinator populations are greatly reduced. Don't get me wrong, I understand why monoculture is used. It's much more efficient to be able to treat large tracts of land in exactly the same manner at exactly the same time. But if pollination ever would become a serious long-term issue, it could be managed simply by diversification. Even the mere stopping of suppression of weeds (or better, planting custom nectar-rich ground covers) would often do the trick (at the cost of a small amount of productivity, as the non-suppressed plants will consume water and nutrients.. on the other hand, legume ground covers actually add nitrates, and mulched ground covers return their nutrients and add organic matter to the soil, so...)
4) The number of different things that have been "conclusively" linked to CCD could fill a book. Lots of people focus on whichever one best fits their preconceived notions. The reality is that the "disorder" is probably just the confluence of many different stressing factors that have been building up over the years. But it's harmful just obsess over one, because they're all serious bee killers. For example, a lot of the neonicotinoid croud cheered when France banned them. CCD became worse the next year. Rather than picking a different family of pesticides to blame, they largely switched to blaming asian hornets, one of the many dozens of CCD-indicted culprits.
The real problem IMHO is decades of high colony numbers to support these mobile pollination services and high honey demand. The amount of bees kept per hectare - given shelter that wouldn't naturally be available, sometimes kept alive via winter feeding of corn syrup, and all sorts of other babying - is way more than nature would support. And so they've proven a breeding ground for (and vector for) all sorts of other problems that previously might have just been local problems, if they even occurred at all. And the problems they breed also take out local wild bees. Combine all of this with additional stressors like pesticides, the disturbance of colonies by relocation, urbanization, changing climate, etc, and eventually it's all going to have to come to a head at some point.
But it's no "beeocalypse", as much as it sucks for apiarists, for whom it's a real financial hit.
Topic: EPA Grants Emergency Exemption To Use Bee Killing Pesticide (Read 3613 times)