An insecticide's to blame? - Here's an interesting article on the Colony Collapse Disorder facing the Bee Hive industry.
Amy Ellis Nutt reports: Suspect in bee die-off: Insecticide Widely used bug spray may be behind deaths of millions of bees- mlive.com.
The chief suspect, say many scientists, is imidacloprid, the most commonly used insecticide on the planet.
Honeybees come into contact with pesticides because they are needed to pollinate scores of crops, including apples, cherries, blueberries and other crops in southwestern Michigan. The die-off has been a major concern for farmers and scientists, who have been looking into potential causes, from diseases and parasites to pesticides.
A member of a class of pesticides called neonicotinoids, imidacloprid is a synthetic derivative of nicotine and works by impairing the central nervous system of insects, causing their neurons to fire uncontrollably and eventually leading to muscle paralysis and death.
At first it's hard for me to understand why something so widely used should now be causing a problem. But the use of this chemical has grown from being used on select crops to almost ubiquitous across the board use from farming to home lawns.
The article makes mention that France was faced with a huge bee die off that many there associated with this chemical and it's use was banned from several uses there.
Also noted is that this insecticide is not necessarily the culprit and so further testing is underway.
Here's another quote from the article that is intriguing to me in how this chemical works on termites:
Some U.S. entomologists who recently have been analyzing dead bees have found a remarkably high number of viruses and fungal diseases in the carcasses, leading them to suspect there may be other culprits besides neonicotinoids.
"I don't think there is one smoking gun,'' Hayes said. "When neonicotinoids are used on termites, they can't remember how to get home, they stop eating, and then the fungus takes over and kills them. That's one of the ways imidacloprid works on termites -- it makes them vulnerable to other natural organisms. So if you look at what's happening to honeybees, that's pretty scary.''
