Journalist Discovers What's Killing the Bees, Makes It Sound Worse Than You Thought

[aggienaut]

   Yikes, it's been a month since I posted here. I blame the worsening perception that no one is actually ON LJ anymore. Frankly when I tried to restart ljshootout and got ONE submission I think it sent me into a spiral of lost hope in LJ.

   But its not too late to join the current season of ljshootout and thus restore hope in LJ! I had set the deadline "one week or when we get seven submissions" .... so its still open!


   Anyway, I thought I'd return here with an entry-length status I had shared on FB, which has been reposted by others so apparently its of interest.

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   There's an article that I've seen a bunch of people post and three different people posted to my wall in 24 hours asking me for my opinion of it: "Scientists Discover What's Killing the Bees and It's Worse Than You Thought." (Spoiler alert: Scientists have not discovered what's killing the bees, and its not worse than you thought)

   First of all, let's cut out the middle-man, the QZ writer, and his typcial alarmist "certain doom!" predictions which have nothing to do with the article he's reporting on. His source is this article from PLoS ONE which came out yesterday.

   The PLoS article is made out of solid research, and I know two of the authors. (Pro-tip: you can just skip down to the discussion section to get to the meaty bits of it)

   The basic conclusions are things we already know: bees are exposed to a LOT of different pesticides out there, up to 21 in one field. And at levels over the documented median lethal dose in two fields! What's interesting is that the neonicotinoids --which everyone has been shouting about lately-- show up but don't have a remarkable effect other than REDUCING incidence of N. ceranae infection (a major bee disease).

   The study did show that fungicides have a worse effect on bees than previously believed. And I've heard it myself in the field from farmers -- "aw no worries mate this is a fungicide we're spraying it won't effect your bees at all." Fungicides kill off beneficial bacteria bees use for various purposes, and according to this study, also increase gut cell mortality, which is probably the primary reason bees exposed to fungicides in this study were three times more likely to become infected with N. ceranae.

   What is actually fairly shocking to me is the degree to which they showed that bees brought in to pollinate nearly ANY of the "new world" crops (ie those that evolved independently of honeybees) by and large did NOT pollinate those crops. This, frankly, probably has a bigger potential impact on the industry, if all the money being spent paying beekeepers to pollinate those crops is essentially just a waste of money.

In conclusion, if the QZ writer actually fully comprehended the article he'd have realized that what he's written, that "one bad winter could leave fields fallow" actually runs contrary to the research of this article -- since the study shows honey bees actually DON'T POLLINATE most of our crops (though not mentioned in this article, the "big one," corn, is also not insect pollinated) . And it's probably not worse than you thought, because this writer and many others have been doing their best to keep you thinking we're on the edge of a fictional "beepocalypse."

So the PLoS article is great. the QZ article isn't awful but only brings some muddling of the facts and confusion to the table. Any time you read an article written by a journalist about a scientific article which they've cited, I recommend skipping ahead to the discussion section of the scientific article.

Comments

[gaeln.livejournal.com]

Interesting because I think I thought that most everything was pollinated by bees! or some sort of insect anyway and that without bees, all would go straight to hell. I can't say I read the article, I instead, went straight to your discussion where I gleamed what I believe I needed to know.

Worst case scenario: all the honey bees disappear. What do you imagine would happen because I seriously don't know. I just know, if it's bad, Monsanto must be involved somehow. I've taken a very strict black&white stand on this. Anything bad involving food, also involves Con-Agra and Monsanto. Any thoughts?

[emo-snal.livejournal.com]

Hahaha.

Well, a lot of things are wind-pollinated, especially things related to grasses, such as all the wheat, rye, oats, etc, and corn. So between those that's probably the bulk of our agricultural product by volume. Most fruits are insect pollinated but here's the thing, and it's not really explained in the article -- honeybees are not native to the Americas. Plants in the Americas evolved without honeybee pollination, and honeybees evolved without pollinating these things. So they look at eachother and don't know what to do with it. Kind of how I feel about Asian girls.

These plants are pollinated by other insects (native "solitary" bees, of which there are countless varieties people hardly ever notice; bumblebees; butterflies; even hummingbirds). So thats why in the study we see that "new world" fruits and vegetables are being largely ignored by honeybees.

So if bees were to go extinct..... certain industries like almonds would have one hell of a time, but I think most other sectors would actually hardly notice a thing.

Monsanto yes and no. Monsanto makes pesticides, which are bad, but they make ("evil non-organic") pesticides which have a narrower focus and can be applied more sparingly; and ("evil non-organic") crops that just plain don't need as much pesticide.

That said, it does appear to be that the huge amount of pesticides pervasive in the agricultural environment is just about drowning the bees' immune system... but it must be kept in mind that without Monsanto or Bayer or whomever else, farmers would still be getting and using pesticides from somehwere, and it would probably be worse.

Its funny I'm finding that when I get to talking about it, a lot of my liberal friends, or especially their friends who are reading my comments on my friend's post, just label me as a non-liberal conservative-apologist who can be disregarded when I say things like this... but really it's because, other than the fact that the above is the truth, I think I tend to question everything including the liberal assumptions that monsanto is bad and the bees are disappearing.