Losing bees would suck so bad. Lots of plants co evolved, requiring pollinators. Orchids are the weirdest, with special moths unique to them [1]. But so much stuff depends on bees. A whole bunch of kinds of fruit trees, different kinds of beans, even celery.
Hand pollination is possible, of course, but that seems like such a pita. Perhaps it's possible to automate.
We have a perfectly good, self optimizing system that constantly moves to optimality. If we could just lighten up a little, not push quite so hard, or even just do localized trials of intensive use pesticides and fertilizers, we could find a balance of what the system can support.
Either go slow and look for local optimizations that are then distributed widely, or engineer immunity, or both.
Ugh. I guess if it was easy, it wouldn't be a problem.
You must be kidding. I can't think of many things that would less possible to do by hand.
We have 10 acres which is mostly in manuka (i.e. manuka honey), spaced a metre apart from each other. When I stand next to any one of those trees and watch the bees flitting hither and thither doing their thing, I am just amazed by nature.
I can't believe the idea that humanity depend on bees.
Sure, no more bees would be a very, very bad news. But humans are a pretty hardy specie. First, we are omnivores. Second, we have conquered the whole planet and live in huge numbers. And third, we are really smart.
Besides cosmic scale events, I don't think of many scenarios that could damage humanity beyond recovery.
As far as i know, no, humanity won't disappear when bees would do (even though I have seen people claiming it). Sure, some plants might solely depend on bees for pollination, but there are also plants which don't and there are also other pollinators. See https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/30495/do-bees-p... for example:
The authors of the FAO analysis concluded that the proportion of global food production
attributable to animal pollination ranges from 5% in industrialized nations to 8% in the developing world.
That being said: it is pretty hard to predict waht would happen suppose there were no bees at all. I doubt it would be nice though.
Pesticides are not enough to explain all the harm to bees. Fungus and parasites can destroy colonies too. We have to consider how to live without as many bees as we have now, because we don't know how to save all the bees.
The right thing to do is it wait until all the conclusive evidence is in. It is anti-science to not think about the corporate bottom line.
It _may_ not be caused by the pesticide, changing or stopping the use of the pesticide could not be necessary and then we would have accidentally saved the world while having less profit.
Naturally Harvested vanilla currently can go for $600 dollars a pop. Although the plant was originally from Mexico, 80% of the worlds' natural vanilla is now harvested in Madagascar.
It is highly unlikely any of you have tasted "all natural" vanilla as 99% of food products in the super market utilize an artificial version of the same critical flavor compound found in the plant: vanillin.
Vanilla plantations do not have the capacity to satisfy the worlds' demand with or without insect pollination.
I can't say as I've paid much attention and I'm sure the majority of ice cream is made from artificial vanilla, but:
Vanilla beans appear to be about $6-7 each retail and $4-5 wholesale according to these random websites, despite there apparently being a bean shortage currently:
I also sincerely doubt that it's "highly unlikely" that most people have tasted real vanilla in their lifetimes. We are in total agreement here because I never said "lifetime" I meant highly unlikely that people have tasted real vanilla in the vanilla product that they buy from the super market. I thought the 99% statistic made that clear... Apologies for not being more detailed, but please don't put words in my mouth, I never said "lifetime."
Also thanks for specifying the price of individual beans. If you calculate the price per pound you will see that it fluctuates,.. last I heard they were $600 per pound. Just to let you know, when people go shopping for vanilla beans, most people don't buy one bean at a time, they buy it by weight because each bean can have a different weight, FYI.
It's not even an edge case. Almost all of the worlds' vanilla flavor is synthesized artificially.
The best example of hand pollination is China where the entire bee population is basically decimated. Almost all of Chinas' farms ALREADY use hand pollination.
They were actually better at it than the bees from memory.
Wage costs I'm sure would be an issue. Sounds like a crazy idea, but can't we just stop using pesticides that have provably been shown to harm a critical part of our food chain? I don't particularly care if Bayer loses profit, or if I have to pay a more realistic price for fruit and veg.
Another weird and fascinating co-evolution of plants ant their pollinators is the genus Ficus (e.g. edible fig plants). The tiny wasps that pollinate the fruit actually die inside it, while a new generation is hatched, mates, then the males burrow a tunnel out of the fig and die, why females continue the cycle.
While true in terms of how they initially evolved, in terms of how they are cultivated, figs don't necessarily require pollination by wasps (or at all). Parthenocarpy, the bearing of fruit without pollination, was probably first cultivated in fig trees thousands of years ago, and is still common today. Some fig cultivars do require pollination to bear fruit, but many don't.
What happens when birds try to eat the fake bees? What happens when they break? Do we just leave them there? What would their batteries made of? Any dangerous material Lithum is not something you want on your water supply
There's no science that says any part of the Earth-human system "constantly moves to optimality". Like, literally any part. It's an out-of-control rollercoaster that we may or may not be able to steward to our liking. "optimality" is a human construct.
I agree, and would extend that to the earth system in general. The universe does not care for good, bad, optimal, or suboptimal; the universe simply is.
Evolution does not necessarily move towards optimal systems, by any definition. It may find local optima, but the process has no guarantees it's moving towards a global optimum.
Those foods are pollinated by livestock bees, not wild bees. In a livestock setting, bee colony pressures are manageable, and are an economic concern, not an existential environmental concern.
A bit but nowhere near as much. Native bees have many advantages. They have vastly more genetic diversity and there are several species. Farmers don't transport them around the country and around the world spreading disease and parasites much faster. And their hives aren't often messed up by humans. And they are better adapted to this environment.
Honeybees are suffering from multiple problems including outbreaks of disease and parasites. Even without pesticide they would be doing bad.
Anecdotally bumble bees are a very common sight here. And I'm surrounded by fields that are sprayed often.
Well, sort of. Bumblebees are probably as susceptible as honeybees, but native bees will preferentially eat from native plants. If most farmers aren't spraying many native plants, the exposure will be less.
Not really; my source is a lecture at a beekeeping meetup (where the lecturers range from top academics to 'a little bit crazy'). I believe the study in question was trying to assess how honeybees, an invasive species, impacted native bee populations; the study found little impact, and attributed it to the preferential feeding. (The replanting of large swaths of America with invasive plant species, such as wheat, presumably does have an impact on native bee populations.)
I'd also note that many native bees also have a much shorter lifecycle - they will be active for a very brief time at a very specific time of the year, when their target plants are flowering, and then they lay their eggs, which will remain dormant / develop slowly for nearly the full year, to hatch again at the appropriate time. This means that you can successfully avoid killing them by timing your pesticide application to avoid flowering plants. Honeybees, on the other hand, are active year round (though confined to their hives in the winter).
A larger threat mentioned in the talk to native bees was actually global warming. Many native bees operate in narrow bands of latitude, only going so far north and south. With the increases in average temperature, we're seeing the southern border of many native bee species move north ... but for whatever reason, not the northern border. I'm not sure why that would be (maybe there are plant species they depend on which spread too slowly?), but it creates a worrisome picture of their habitat being squeezed out of existence.
Nobody said anything about honey - just bees. The only fine we should be talking about is the fine for what these people have already done. There would obviously be and has been a massive deleterious effect from the loss of so many pollinators. Monsanto's shareholders and other like minded criminals should fined out of existence as a warning to others who would seek to destroy our world for profit. Show absolutely no mercy and go after even private holdings for good measure. Change the law if needs be and act retrospectively. The world must act in concert against the cynical and greedy polluters be they corporations, individuals or states.
I'd define as "native" anything that was around before the Europeans showed up. Corn, potatoes, many kinds of beans, tomatoes. Those were all domesticated, and I don't know how you'd count them as a percentage.
Don't forget too meat - much if the meat we eat depends upon pollenated foodstuffs - if we were to raise cattle, sheep and chickens only on grasses and local foods we'd likely have far lower heads of animals per farm and higher costs (which I'd argue for many would be a good thing, but for those who can't afford it, it would be devastating)
Well, I wasn't claiming there was, but not quite sure what to infer from your comment.
I mean, I know (from recent reading) that there's a fairly intensive operation to maintain hives exclusively for almond farming. Are you saying these are not affected by CCD, neonics, or whatever?
CCD manifests itself as greater overwintering losses to colonies. Bee farmers have lots of colonies. They can split colonies and buy new queens. It's not like Dutch Elm disease; it doesn't kill all the bees.
The use of a corporation like Monsanto...control.
Food used to be food. Now, it's patented ingredients. Control of food, along with control of health care, currency, education, war, religion, entertainment, water, the media...
Instead of gradual, spontaneous unifying of the world's Nations, it is being hastened, directed by unseen hands. "GMO is the way to go."
Illegal to collect rain water in some U.S. States. Fiat money and centralized banks. Control. Banks too big to fail. The countries with which we are at war do not yet have central banks. Dropping population to a more manageable number.
Note that the new HONEST act is designed to stop the EPA being able to act in studies like this because the environmental data can't be independently reproduced.
here is the problem I have with the way it was done before this bill was passed:
The EPA was allowed to used scientific research that was not publically available for review.
This seems contrary to everything I have been taughgt about critical thinking and the scientific method of research
Am I wrong?
Reproducible is different from "available for review." The purpose of the bill was most likely for any corp to cast doubt on a finding, and/or pay for shill-scientists to not be able to reproduce it, giving reason to incapacitate the EPA.
I think the EPA should be allowed to err on the side of caution. Their job should be to regulate chemicals and practices for the protection of the environment. It isn't mistake to prevent a company from harming the env. I'd like the logic to be inverted; Everything that interacts with the environment should be guilty until proven benign. Default to deny. As we get more technologically advanced, the number of mistakes that can only-happen-once is ever increasing.
I've heard this claim a few times before (always from people trying to handcuff the EPA rulemaking process, funny enough) and I haven't looked into the specifics too closely, but my experience working with and around EPA on regional air quality issues has been that the regulations lag at least 10 to 20 years behind the science.
American farming practices are a perfect storm of detriments to the honey bee. Widespread use of pesticides is, of course, directly bad. The monoculture of crops also exacerbates the accumulation of pesticides, since bees get a smaller variety of food. And due to the heavily managed style of beekeeping, hives are closer together and are inhibited from swarming, leading to even more propagation of Varroa mites.
American farming practices are, as a sibling comment of this one says, really the only reason there are large numbers of honey bees in America. Honey bees aren't a native species, and feral honey bees were eradicated from North America ~20 years ago by the Varroa destructor mite.
Your parent comment cited two specific cases of farming practices that harm bees, and you're responding with the general case of all combined farming practices. Why not go even more general and note that, whatever benefits farming might provide to bees clearly aren't enough in the context of all factors, because bee populations are in decline.
I'm sure you can find specific farming practices that are beneficial to bees, but I don't think you can make a good faith argument that i.e. pesticides are the reason there are large numbers of bees.
I think I'm trying to say, talking about how farming practices have harmed American honey bees is a little like talking about how farming practices have harmed dairy cows.
I get what you're saying, and what you're saying is factual, it's just not useful information. Pesticides at least are a clear cause of hive collapse, and lumping pesticide use in with the larger monolith of "farming practices" only serves to obfuscate the problem.
No one is arguing that we should throw out all of modern farming practices, so there's no need to jump to their defense.
> hives are closer together and are inhibited from swarming
Can you expand on this? I've been thinking about getting a hive and coincidentally was wondering about this earlier today -- can you let a hive swarm without losing it? I.e. does a spritely new queen take half the hive with her? Is it healthier for the hive to do so?
If you have some trees around the hives the swarm will usually hang there for a few hours so it is entirely possible to catch it. These swarms are the best since they are ready to build new home and they build really really fast if you catch them and put them into new hive. What is left in the old hive are half of the bees and new queen.
Now about hive health. There is this thing called Varroa and if you let the hive swarm half of it goes with the swarm and the other half stays. Varroa I mean. What is really good with swarming is that the hive now has a virgin queen and she doesn't lay eggs right away and a lot of Varroa dies off because they can't reproduce. They need eggs and bee larvae to do so. The swarm with old queen has an interruption as well because they need to build comb and cells where the queen lays eggs.
In my beekeeping years ago I kept hives healthy ( fight against Varroa ) entirely with letting them swarm.
Just to write it once again since by your writing I think you are confused...Old queen leaves with the swarm.
To clarify the parent comment, Varroa is a parasite that lives on honey bees and can spread diseases harmful to the bees. It's one of the suggested causes of colony collapse disorder.
They also eradicated feral honeybees several decades ago (all honeybees in the US are alien to the continent; almost all today are livestock, not wildlife).
Although I must say that natural swarms show greater vigor when building new comb than splits. Even packaged bees built faster than splits. That is of course my experience and you have to keep in consideration that I didn't add any foundation to new colonies so that was maybe one of the reasons. I let them build their own comb on a narrow strip in the frame/top bar and never tried with full foundation.
You make it fall into a box. Shake the branch they are resting on, or brush them off until they fall. You cant tell if the queen made it into the box depending on the behavior of the workers already in there. If you missed it, goto step 1.
We had a swarm in our orchard at the weekend and I watched a local beekeeper do exactly this. The queen must have gone into the box as all the bees still left on the tree or flying around soon followed into the box.
During yesterday's evening walk past a corn field, it occurred to me that the impending roboticization (?) of farming may enable synergistic multiple plant fields/plantings on a large scale. What was the old (apocryphal, or not?) Native American combination: Corn, squash, and beans? (I'm just going by memory, as I was yesterday evening while walking.)
We may be on the edge of a new wave of a more organic farming, on a mass scale. Using plant communities and synergies to reduce or need for the more simplistic, mass application of chemicals.
Without even getting into all the genetic engineering and the like that is sure, however you feel about it, to continue.
I have also had that idea. Instead of giant machines only capable of harvesting monocultures, couldn't we downscale to small, autonomous vehicles that can farm efficiently on a vegetable garden at scale. Many cheap drones to farm the way our ancestors did using manual labour
That would be quite the change. In fact, it could enable many people to produce a lot on their own land, because they don't have to spend all the time doing it.
The sound is a problem in this plan. Bees are very sensitive to vibration. They would probably desert any cultured place with drones working continously. Can be avoided if you schedule the drone work, but must be adressed.
There's a few indie projects out there now that automate veggie-patch-scale farming. They more often use a large pick-and-place type system than a small rover, though.
The Restoration Agriculture scene might be interesting to you.
I can't find a great page to link to, but this has a decent, short description of what they are doing:
https://www.forestag.com/pages/mark-shepard
> Trees, shrubs, vines, canes, perennial plants and fungi are planted in association with one another to produce food (for humans and animals), fuel, medicines, and beauty. Hazelnuts, chestnuts, walnuts and various fruits are the primary woody crops. The farm is entirely solar and wind powered and farm equipment is powered with locally produced biofuels that are not taken from the human food chain.
The part that interests me is, they can grow half as much of a crop per acre as a monoculture, but they can do it for like 10 different crops in the same area.
And they don't have to spray it with poison, so there are cool things like tree frogs out there.
It's a cute story, but Bayer has disputed the results of this study, still disagrees that their pesticides impact bee populations, and shows no signs of phasing out sales as far as I know.
It would be a convenient Discovery. It sounds like it would also confirm they knew of harm, per another another poster they are disputing the outcome of the study. I don't they have a replacement lined up
Did anyone ever assert that neonicotinoids were harmless to bees? I thought the questions were about whether the harm was sustainable at an effective level of use, whether (and how quickly) bee populations (and which species) could adapt to their presence, whether harm to pollinators could be mitigated by changes in the way we use these pesticides. The harm also had to be compared to the benefit of their use (generally in terms of improvements in crop yield and quality). An ideal environment for pollinators has to be measured in terms of the requirement to feed a population of human beings that has doubled in my lifetime, and like it or not, pesticides and other chemicals are part of that. The reason neonicotinoids were originally attractive was reduced toxicity to mammals and birds, so it's not a no-brainer to replace them with something else.
I thought it was the EPA, not the FDA, that regulated pesticides in the US. I have no recollection of reports of either the FDA malfeasance you claim nor of any reports of widespread re-import of domestic bee colonies. In fact, I had thought that importation of such colonies was pretty tightly regulated due to pathogen and parasite concerns. In other words: citation needed.
Without stipulating that this actually happened --- that bee farmers today are relying entirely on Australian imports --- you're still begging the question. Why? What difference does it make?
Personally, I think any mass death event of an important species is extremely worrisome, irrespective of their source, and necessitates root-cause analysis and careful examination of the current equilibrium.
I think one important thing to point out here is this is a _insecticide_ study, not an _herbicide_ study, because they're very very different things.
That being said, I'd like to see the results replicated independently. As there article points out, there are a bunch of asterisks in the claims... and a lot of conflicting conclusions.
A lot of “compounds of interest” such as nicotine, opium latex, and capsaicin evolved as part of the natural defense mechanisms of plants against insects and herbivores.
So "nicotinoids" means "chemically similar to nicotine", and... "neo-" means new. Some of the literature refers to nicotinoids and some to neonicotinoids.
What I haven't been able to figure out is if there was essentially a "second wave" of nicotinoids that someone -- a scientist or marketer -- figured was deserving of the "neo-" prefix.
One random, uneducated guess from me: Maybe the "neo-" prefix is only for those that don't show up in nature, so they have to be produced in labs, and are thus "new" to the environment?
Indeed but people confuse the two. Almost all of the issues with pesticides come from insecticides specifically. Insectices are designed to kill animals after all.
"One problem: The data in the paper (and hundreds of pages of supporting data not included but available in background form to reporters) do not support that bold conclusion. No, there is no consensus evidence that neonics are “slowly killing bees.” No, this study did not add to the evidence that neonics are driving bee health problems."
...
"But based on the study’s data, the headline could just as easily have read: “Landmark Study Shows Neonic Pesticides Improve Bee Health”—and it would have been equally correct."
Funny, I was just going to mention my good friend Jon Entine as someone to watch out for. Thanks for providing the hook.
Jon Entine is a media-savvy corporate propagandist and pseudo-journalist who fronts the opinions and positions of chemical corporations by pretending to be an independent journalist. He has ties to biotech companies Monsanto and Syngenta while playing a key role in another industry front group known as the American Council on Science and Health, a thinly-veiled corporate front group that Sourcewatch describes as holding “a generally apologetic stance regarding virtually every other health and environmental hazard produced by modern industry, accepting corporate funding from Coca-Cola, Kellogg, General Mills, Pepsico, and the American Beverage Association, among others.”
That Slate are engaged with a special partnership with Entine's propaganda mill speaks exceedingly poorly of Slate.
Specific to the Slate article, Entine claims that bee populations aren't dying. The supporting link is to an article that states ... bee populations are dying, and where they aren't dying and leaving corpses behind, they are simply vanishing without a trace. Sadly for Mr. Entine's argument, neither death nor disappearance makes for a health bee colony. He's attempting to mislead, misdirect, and language-lawyer his way around a point. He fails.
I've encountered him previously. Ironically, if his propagandistic techniques weren't so over-the-top self-parodying, he might have snuck past my bullshit filter.
The author of the Gplus screed should spend some time looking at Nassim Nicholas Taleb's Twitter history. He might then understand the context of the article Entine wrote. But then, both that piece and the Propagandists article do little more than make guilt by association attacks.
There's also Etine's "If you can't attack the science, attack the scientist". Which a) has been pulled from his website but b) exists on the Internet Archive and c) points to an article at The American, motto, "The Journal of the American Enterprise Institute" (yet another Libertarian / Free Market Fundamentalism disinformation mill), and which goes into gory detail projecting the whole mechanism of personal and reputationa attacks, on the other party.
Ironic as those attacks were polished and perfected by the Libertarian / Free Market Fundamentalism crowd, as well documented by Robert Proctor, Naomi Oreskes, and others.
The substance of that particular article: Entine's defence of the now largely deprecated chemical bysphenol A, a/k/a BPA, an endocrine disruptor.
"based on other evidence -- largely from animal studies -- the FDA expressed "some concern" about the potential effects of BPA on the brain, behavior, and prostate glands in fetuses, infants, and young children."
Entine's own stock in trade is largely reputation attacks, smears, and playing loose, if at all, with the facts.
Again: first time I came across him, my first response was neutral. But that (and the Slate) article are so content-free and slippery that my hackles went up. That paid off.
Even my biotech friends are coming around to that viewpoint (having been initially critical).
This is one area where the scientific method feels like a subpar approach to deciding policy. I'll grant that it's likely better than the alternative in most cases but man does it create some really dangerous blind spots.
The EU temporarily banned the chemical four years ago on the precautionary principle.
I like this approach: the harm done by not being able to use these pesticides for a while, were they to turn out to not be harmful, would surely be outweighed by the risk of further harming the ecosystem.
This approach was also under attack while negotiating TTIP and other trade agreements. Ironically it was badmouthed as unscientific - as if it's better to throw any new heavily patented chemical on the market and let science figure out reliably that it's problematic - something that can take up to 20 years if it's with possible at all with enough scientific rigor - of course public research can't get any details due to patents and trade secrets - also ecosystems are not exactly easy to replicate in the lab.
>of course public research can't get any details due to patents and trade secrets //
Not sure about other jurisdictions but UK patent law allows an invention to be worked for research purposes.
Presumably companies don't get licenses to produce chemicals for widespread release to the environment without disclosure of the details, so trade secrets shouldn't be a problem?
"Although the study found that neonicotinoids have an overall negative effect on bees, the results aren’t completely clear-cut: the pesticides seemed to harm bees at the UK and Hungarian sites, but apparently had a positive effect on honeybees in Germany. Pywell notes that the German effects were “short lived”, and the reason for them is unclear. They might be linked in part to the generally healthier state of hives in the German arm of the trial, he speculates"
Bollocks! Neonics harm bees because that is what they are designed to do - break insects. I'm not an expert but there have been rather a lot of articles in New Scientist describing "confused" bees relating to neonics over the last few years.
Time to bring back DDT. It was banned for misinformed reasons without any evidence to show that accumulation contributed to cancer or anything else nasty in mammals.[1] Neonics are reported to be 5,000-10,000 more toxic to bees. [2]
A 5 minute walk in fields around me will lead to at least 3 ticks latching on. We're now facing the Lone Star tick that causes a life threatening meat allergy (wtf) and Lyme's disease. I've also personally reported one of the first cases of West Nile virus in this state from a found dead bird. Now there's Zika, which seems great for humans. Oh and we can't forget the re-proliferation of bed bugs as well. But yeah, we should keep trusting the newer classes of pesticides that don't work as well and haven't been studied as thoroughly.
Bed bugs are practically immune to DDT. I looked into this a few years ago because DDT seemed like a perfect fit for the problem. (Mattresses are indoors, easy to saturate and used for more than a decade.) Turns out the LD50 for DDT is like 100000 ppm.‡ Think about that. Ten. Percent. Of their body weight.
(IMHO, DDT should be allowed for mosquito nets, as long as they are only used indoors and people know to incinerate the old nets instead of throwing them out. It is so darn effective and we were so boneheaded stupid the first time around.)
> Bed bugs are practically immune to DDT. I looked into this a few years ago because DDT seemed like a perfect fit for the problem. (Mattresses are indoors, easy to saturate and used for more than a decade.) Turns out the LD50 for DDT is like 100000 ppm.‡ Think about that. Ten. Percent. Of their body weight.
Ugh, noted. Thanks for the correction. I am aware of some resistance among specific mosquito species as well, but the residual repellant effect still makes it crazy useful for application on screens, nets, and tents.
Kept re-reading the first part of your post to make sure the LD50 wasn't 100% - literally drowning them. 10% is better but that's an alarming dose requirement.
Having an agenda doesn't mean it's immediately untrue, but it's worth being more skeptical. Are the sources picked because they support the agenda, and are the sources faithfully represented? A desire to see a particular outcome can skew these, and you should be more cautious compared to someone more independent.
DDT was brutal on the bird population. My father worked with state DNR to bring back the Bald Eagle population after DDT decimated it due to the soft eggshells it caused.
Presently we produce something like 5500 kcal per person on earth. Much of it to feed animals. Producing enough nutrition is not the issue - distribution and patterns of consumption are (and these are more political barriers than physical ones).
We could also scale back our agriculture by reducing our dependence on animal products. There are a number of mass produced crops that go in large part to feed animals that we then turn into food at a net energy loss. But in general, we'd rather paint ourselves into this corner than eat our vegetables.
>2) use DDT and kill off birds + danger to mammals
No danger to mammals, kill some birds (the hawk/eagle shell thinning was a lie[1], does kill some songbirds in high doses but I guess so does Teflon stoves), kills far less helpful insects.
It's the only one out of the three options where you don't risk killing hundreds of millions of people with disease and/or famine.
The Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons has also published articles claiming that HIV does not cause AIDS, that global warming is not human-caused and is beneficial anyway, that abortion causes breast cancer, and that vaccines cause autism. It is published by a far-right advocacy group and is neither a credible nor neutral source.
Yeah, other than the fact that the raptor population bounced back after DDT use was curtailed.
The issue has been pretty extensively studied and while you can cherry-pick individual studies the broad consensus is that DDT was one of the contributing factors.
>Yeah, other than the fact that the raptor population bounced back after DDT use was curtailed.
The raptor population was bouncing back right as we started to introduce DDT. It's a funny thing that happens when you stop incentivizing shooting of the birds (wasn't until the early 40's they got federal protection, and it takes time for populations to recover). If you'd have read the sources I've linked (and the any of the citations in those sources) you'd see you're wrong.
'But my father', anecdotes are nice when they come along with data. Stringing together multiple studies is the best way to disprove an established narrative... but unfortunately the amount of time it takes to disprove well applied bullshit greatly outweighs the time it took to apply it.
EDIT: Also while I'm at it. Ever think to consider that thin shells might have been caused by greatly increased mercury and lead levels of the time? We banned TEL and reduced coal consumption since then. Look at nearly every study that concluded DDT had to be to blame for thin shells and you'll find they noted increased lead, mercury, and aluminum levels along with... but never put it into their conclusion.
That is true and andybak is correct. I have been thinking more and more about this and the mind certainly wanders to dark places.
On the other hand, it is a problem that keeps getting bigger.
It feels a bit like the elephant in the room. Either because of the aforementioned "solutions" that come up initially[1] or because "science will fix it" since it has been shown that once people have it well they stop having a lot of kids.
Still, every five days there's 1 million more people on this earth and it doesn't look like most of these people will have it good in the near future. And meanwhile everything else just has to make room for more of us. It just doesn't seem sustainable.
[1] And who am I to stop people from having kids? I've got two myself.
This is actually good news. Colony collapse disorder has been a pretty mysterious problem up until now. Identifying a possible cause gives us a chance to stop it. This might not even require legislation.
Now that farmers are aware of the link many will choose to reduce or stop using neonicotinoids entirely. If they don't do this voluntarily, they may be forced to do so by commercial beekeepers. Many farms rely on commercial beekeepers who they hire to transport bee hives to their fields when pollination is required. These beekeepers may simply refuse to hire out their bees to farms using neonicotinoid pesticides. It threatens their livelihood directly after all.
This is certainly bad news for neonicotinoid producers, at least in the short term. It's possible that neonicotinoids are not the problem and that reducing their use will do nothing to stop CCD. However, it seems inevitable that this is something that will be tried. We can only hope that the alternatives that farmers choose don't turn out to be even worse for bees.
and this more recently, 'Pesticides: an update of human exposure and toxicity'
" A huge body of evidence exists on the possible role of pesticide exposures in the elevated incidence of human diseases such as cancers, Alzheimer, Parkinson, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, asthma, bronchitis, infertility, birth defects, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, autism, diabetes, and obesity. Most of the disorders are induced by insecticides and herbicides most notably organophosphorus, organochlorines, phenoxyacetic acids, and triazine compounds."
"
In summary, young children may be
especially vulnerable to pesticides because
of the sensitivity of their developing organ
systems combined with a limited ability to
enzymatically detoxify these chemicals
(13,123,126-131). According to the
National Academy of Sciences (13), children's
OP exposures are of special concern
because "exposure to neurotoxic compounds
at levels believed to be safe for
adults could result in permanent loss of
brain function if it occurred during the
prenatal and early childhood period of
brain development" (13). Because there is
so little information available on the levels
and routes of children's pesticide exposure,
it is not feasible to conduct a risk assessment
predicting the likelihood of adverse
effects based on animal studies. Thus far,
there are no data in children to support or
refute the hypothesized health effects of
chronic low-level pesticide exposure."
"We conclude that PT and PO are genotoxic, while DF shows mitogenic activity. An important finding of this study is that PT had higher genotoxic potential than PO, which warrants for further investigations to correctly evaluate the hazards of exposure to these chemicals."
"Collectively, our results implicate gluconeogenesis as the key mechanism behind organophosphate-induced hyperglycemia, mediated by the organophosphate-degrading potential of gut microbiota. This study reveals the gut microbiome-mediated diabetogenic nature of organophosphates and hence that the usage of these insecticides should be reconsidered."
It must be painful to pay 3+ million for a study which ends up doing you a disservice. I wonder if these researchers will be able to find work outside of academia in the future now that other corporations know that they can't be corrupted.
Even people who care nothing for the irreplaceable beauty of nature ought to consider how much measurable economic value we risk destroying in the name of short-term profits. Of course (as the podcast explores) it's a complicated equation, but still a very compelling one.
Is smoking tobacco harmful to your health?
Is lead in petrol poisoning children?
Is the earth heating up due to mankind's actions?
Are bees being harmed by pesticides?
Seems like all these things have answers that, being honest, we all knew the answer to long before the question was "settled". But there was an awful lot of money to be made prolonging the ambiguity.
I (and I'm sure many others) feel exactly the same way. But we also need to admit the possibility of something like confirmation bias. So, you've mentioned several cases where we finally got a result which was exactly what we expected all along. Those cases stand out to use because they our brains naturally prefer them to cases where we were wrong. So then I have a couple of questions.
When were we wrong? What are some other cases which didn't turn out like we expected? It may be harder to think of them but they must exist. What would have been the consequence of acting too early on those cases based on our speculation, now that we know we had been wrong?
Do you think we should start to take a more proactive approach to these kinds of problems? I mean, should we look at a problem and assume it's caused by whatever happens to look like the culprit?
One example of where we are wrong is the commonly held belief that saccharin causes cancer. I mean, it's artificial, it's cheating to get sweetness, it has to be bad right? Turns out the initial studies looking at bladder cancer in rats were misleading (lots of confounders).
Is dietary cholesterol harmful? Obviously it is, except no experiment or even commonly advanced scientific hypothesis ever said it was. The hypothesis was that saturated fat intake raised blood cholesterol levels which in turn lead to more heart disease. But common wisdom was that somehow this meant egg yolks must be deadly. And shrimp.
Oh, and then the saturated fat hypothesis didn't replicate well.
And so forth.
In contrast to your sentiment, I wish we actually based more policy on well replicated science, rather than what is "obvious."
Yes, keeping people confused about the science is an industry tactic. However, saying "we all knew the answer" is just hindsight bias, not real knowledge. Respect the science, don't pretend it didn't need to be done.
If you're curious about what's going on in the world, yes, you will be curious about whether insecticides affect all insects, and how much they're affected. (After all, there are many different species.)
I didn't mean to imply that we shouldn't test the assumption. I just meant that it's not unreasonable to expect that a broad-spectrum insecticide family would have a good chance of affecting any given insect type.
It's still more ambiguous than stated given the differing results per country(both positive and negative) and they didn't control for fungicide use.
We clustered sites into triplets (>3.2 km between sites) and randomly allocated sites to one of three treatments: (i) clothianidin applied at 11.86 to 18.05 grams of active ingredient per hectare (g a.i. ha−1) with a fungicide (thriam and prochloraz) and nonsystemic pyrethroid (beta-cyfluthrin) (trade name Modesto); (ii) thiamethoxam applied at 10.07 to 11.14 g a.i. ha−1 and combined with the fungicides fludioxonil and metalaxyl-M (trade name Cruiser); and (iii) control OSR receiving a commercial fungicide (thriam and dimethomorph in Germany and Hungary and thriam and prochloraz in the United Kingdom) but no neonicotinoid seed treatment.
Fungicides may have synergistic effects when used with pesticides. [0][1][2]
The other study, "Chronic exposure to neonicotinoids reduces honey bee health near corn crops" is a bit more credible. Corn is a non-uniform seed and more apt to ablate the seed coat and generate significant dust issues, hence Canada's regulation to for seed lubrication. Ground persistence and mobility make setting up adjacent pollinator refuge sites a potential source of neonicotinoids in addition to the irrigated surface water. That corn is wind pollinated and only provides a nutrient poor pollen kind of exacerbates that, I think.
Contrast that with western Canada where CCD hasn't been observed in canola regions, canola seed is uniform and canola provides both nutritious pollen and nectar.
I still don't think an outright ban at this point is the right choice especially given the limited alternatives and research into those alternatives. Organophosphates are significantly worse for both humans and bees. Pyrethrins aren't exactly safe for bees either, with both being broad-spectrum insecticides and requiring more frequent application via foliar spraying. Even IPM guidelines for a pest like the flea beetle rank several types of neonicotinoids above using pyrethrins[3].
There really aren't any easy solutions but, reevaluating the use of prophylactic seed treatment should be worth a consideration.
We need to hear all sides of this debate before coming to any conclusions.
It's probably time to inject as much political vitriol into this as possible, and pretend to debate this controversial 'study' and so-called 'science' for another several decades at a minimum to really verify the science. If the bees aren't politicized and ranted against by talking heads, politicians, and cable TV pundits, how will we ever know what to think of them?
Bees are for wimps, pollinating is part of the study thumping pro-science evidence based agenda!
Hand pollination is possible, of course, but that seems like such a pita. Perhaps it's possible to automate.
We have a perfectly good, self optimizing system that constantly moves to optimality. If we could just lighten up a little, not push quite so hard, or even just do localized trials of intensive use pesticides and fertilizers, we could find a balance of what the system can support.
Either go slow and look for local optimizations that are then distributed widely, or engineer immunity, or both.
Ugh. I guess if it was easy, it wouldn't be a problem.