National Pollinator Week kicks off - with a huge bee kill

Sun: 29' Gemini
Moon: 28'Scorpio
Waxing Gibbous - 3 days before Full

My sister Alohi, who runs the blog Tales of Alohi, tipped me off to this story on OregonLive earlier this morning:

25,000 bumblebees killed, dropping from trees in Wilsonville; pesticide suspected

 25,000 bees.  55 trees, known to have been sprayed with neonicotinoid pesticides just days before as National Pollinator Week began.

The European Union has issued a continent-wide ban on the use of these "neonic" pesticides.  Why?  Because they have found sufficient evidence for concern that the extreme toxicity of these insecticides (to bees as well as to the insects they're intended to kill) is contributing significantly to Colony Collapse Disorder - observed worldwide among farmers and beekeepers for years now.  The evidence is strong enough that Vladimir Putin almost refused to meet with Secretary of State John Kerry because his outrage and fury over America's support for the companies that make them - including Monsanto, Bayer, and Syngenta.

If you like to eat, you may want to keep reading this one...

The pesticide that was in use on the 55 European linden trees on Saturday (15Jun2013) is called Safari, active ingredient is dinotefuran.  Here's the link to it, and to its MSDS.  (Seriously, if you don't know how to read and use an MSDS, you need to learn.  It isn't hard, and the benefits of knowing far outweigh the risks of not.  There is a lot of toxic shit that gets slipped into your work, your home, and even your food and tap water without you knowing otherwise.)  To be honest, I've never heard of this company Valent before - but it's not a big surprise.  The ones pushing hardest for the use of pesticides are - surprise, surprise - the chemical companies that make them, and the neonics are popular, which means big money.  Monsanto, Bayer, Syngenta are in on them as well.

Looking at the MSDS, I can see why the landscapers would want to use it - assuming the MSDS is accurate in this case (which I doubt - if more people knew how to read/use them, there'd be no chemical industry left).  It's supposed to be minimally toxic to humans - which is great, considering they were spraying around a major cheap-brand department store on a weekend.  It's moderately toxic to birds, however (meaning it'll get them sick, maybe violently so, but not likely to kill them), and... the label and MSDS note it to be "extremely toxic to bees."  Probably ought to list this on their website along with all the OTHER insects it's known to kill.  (It's also toxic enough to shrimp that it shouldn't be applied to anything near a waterway that runs to the ocean - yet somehow is not considered a marine pollutant.)

Ok, perhaps a note is in order here on exactly how these neonics work.  Essentially, they're fast-acting neurotoxins - nerve poisons - as far as insects are concerned.  They block essential nerve pathways in the insect's brain and body, leading to paralysis and death - exactly what was seen with the bees in Oregon.  They're chemically related to nicotine (does that mean they're addictive?), and the class is popular due to the fact that it's less toxic (to humans) than others.  They've been around since the 1980s, when Shell and Bayer started making them.  The Wikipedia page on neonicotinoids, for once, actually has a lot of good, well-researched and viable information on them, which I recommend for an introductory review.

Please note that this pesticide is water-soluble (it dissolves in water), and slow to break down.  It can be taken up into plants, which renders all parts of the plant toxic - including the nectar on which the bees feed - and it cannot be washed off or out.  I don't know how to emphasize this any more.  Research is showing that humans also receive toxic effects from low doses, particularly in the developing brain - which puts children and the unborn at even greater risk than adults.  And virtually all of the corn soybean crop grown in the US is treated with some variant of neonic (they're also virtually all GMO). 

What are these toxic effects on the developing human brain?  We don't know - but there's been a disturbing rise in the number of prescriptions issued for psychiatric drugs over the last 30 years... the same time period that neonics have been in use... the same time period in which beekeepers began to notice the unacceptably high losses among their hives... spiking in the last 10 years, as neonics and GMOs both began to hit the market in full force.

So, the cornfield is treated with the insecticide.  The plants absorb the insecticide, not just one dose but repeated doses over the course of the growing season.  The bees come by to pollinate: they don't know the nectar is poison to them now, but they're stricken and die.  (The few who do make it make to the hive produce toxic honey: bees are known to raid each others' colonies for the honey that will see them through the winter, yet a healthy hive will not touch the honey produced by a hive stricken by Colony Collapse Disorder.)  You purchase the products made with poison-laced corn - and maybe the poison-laced honey as well (I have no information on what gets done with the honey from collapsed hives, but the beekeepers do have to earn a living themselves, as well - especially as their livelihoods die off around them.)  You feed them to your family: your spouse, your pets... your children... again and again and again...

Do you see where this is going?  Don't you just love the ingredients that are part of your food, but not listed on the label?

We are all connected.  And, for more reasons than just the extent to which we rely on bees to pollinate our food supply... as the bees go, so do we.  Support for organic farmers and farming methods is not just a vote for your own health, but for the bees as well - and for your continued ability to afford to buy food.

There's my contribution to National Pollinator Week.

Update:
I just spotted this as well, from ScienceDaily: how pesticides are annihilating aquatic ecosystems.