50% of US Bees Dead.

“We’ve been doing this 30 years, & we’ve never experienced this kind of loss before.”~ Jeremy Hance

Colony Collapse Disorder: Common Pesticides Disrupt Brain Functioning in Bees.

Update via Reddit r/permaculture:

Recent bee related death reports:

Bee deaths a result of pesticide Safari; count upped to 50,000 dead insects

Meanwhile, other reports of bees dying around Wilsonville and surrounding towns have prompted Xerces to check whether similar pesticides were used elsewhere.

“My worry is that we’re going to lose sight of the real message,” said Mace Vaughan of Xerces. “I think we’re (using insecticides) all over the place, and people are doing it in their backyards without even knowing it.”

U.S. Bee Deaths From Colony Collapse Disorder May Be Tied To Diet, Study Finds (Boston, MA)

Agrichemical and pesticide makers like Monsanto, Bayer AG and Syngenta are also launching projects to study and counter colony collapse.

Few deny that pesticides – particularly a class of commonly used insecticides called neonicotinoids – can be harmful to bees in the laboratory. It is unclear what threat the insecticides pose under current agricultural usage. Some scientists say habitat decline and disease-carrying parasites, such as the Varroa mite, are the chief cause of bee deaths.

Agri-giants trying to solve bee deaths (St. Louis, MO)

One of every three bites of food we consume depends on pollination by honeybees, but these overlooked contributors to our food system are continuing to die in stubbornly perplexing ways.

In 2006, beekeepers started noticing that bees were abandoning their hives, a phenomenon scientists dubbed Colony Collapse Disorder. Since then, the American bee population has dropped by an average of 30 percent every year, sending researchers, beekeepers and farmers into a head-scratching frenzy to figure out the cause.

Study links insecticides to bee deaths (Quebec, Canada)

According to Jean-Pierre Chapleau, spokesman for the Quebec Beekeepers’ Federation, beekeepers want neonicotinoid insecticides banned.

“Neonicotinoid insecticides are overused,” he says. Chapleau said that beekeepers don’t blame farmers, because they can’t buy seeds that have not been treated with insecticides even if they want to.

The industry says that’s not accurate.

Scottish bee deaths double in a single year (Scotland)

SBA president Phil McAnespie said: “Last summer and autumn were very bad, which is obviously an issue and viruses are associated with that. “I think most of the losses are down to the weather. Obviously, there is concern about neonicotinoids and there is ongoing research into that but I don’t think they have played any major part in this [the increase in bee deaths].”

Update: Animal agriculture carnage: Third of all honeybee colonies in England did not survive winter(guardian.co.uk)

Update: Bee keepers’ use of corn syrup and other honey substitutes as bee feed may be contributing to colony collapse (reuters.com)

Update: 1/3 of US Honeybee Colonies Died Last Winter, Threatening US Food Supply – “We’re getting closer & closer to the point where we don’t have enough bees in this country to meet pollination demands,” said entomologist Dennis vanEngelstorp, who led survey documenting declines. (wired.com)

Update: It’s confirmed: It’s getting worse. Cover of the NY Times today, edging out even the Taliban. Thing is, this threat we know how to stop.

“Bee Die-Off Soars, Putting Crops at Risk A mysterious malady seems to have expanded drastically in the past year, wiping out as many as half of the beehives needed to pollinate much of America’s produce.”

Exposure to commonly used pesticides directly disrupts brain functioning in bees, according to new research in Nature.”

While the study is the first to record that popular pesticides directly injure bee brain physiology, it adds to a slew of recent studies showing that pesticides, especially neonicotinoids, are capable of devastating bee hives and may be, at least, partly responsible for on-going Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD).

Christopher Connolly with the University of Dundee in Scotland and his team exposed honeybees to two pesticides at levels encountered in the wild: neonicotinoids and miticidal pesticides.

By recording brain activity after exposure, the researchers found that both pesticides directly hampered bee brain functioning, including blocking neurons from firing. The findings are especially notable for studying bees after exposure to the miticidal pesticide, which is used directly on bee hives to safeguard them from a common parasite, the Varroa destructor mite. In this case, however, the cure may be worse than the disease. Connolly explains:

“Much discussion of the risks posed by the neonicotinoid insecticides has raised important questions of their suitability for use in our environment. However, little consideration has been given to the miticidal pesticides introduced directly into honeybee hives to protect the bees from the Varroa mite. We find that both have negative impact on honeybee brain function.”

Furthermore the researchers found that when bees were exposed to both chemicals—the neonicotinoids and miticidal pesticides—their brain functioning and learning abilities were hurt even more.

The study is the first to show the direct brain impacts that may explain why bees exposed to these pesticides slow aberrant behavior, including losing their way easily and slow reactions.

Scientists both in the U.S. and Europe have recorded the complete collapse of hives following exposure. However, pesticide companies have continually argued that their products cause no harm to bees even as high-profile independent research from multiple sources appears to be telling a very different story.

The research has spurred some policy movement. France has banned the use of neonicotinoids on certain crops. The EU proposed a ban on neonicotinoids for two years after a committee looked at the research for six months. However, the ban was scuttled by opposition from Germany and the UK, though it could still come up in appeal.

Most recently, nine beekeeping and environmental groups sued the U.S. Environment Protection Agency (EPA) for failing to take action to protect bees.

Bees are key plant pollinators, and their decline has worried scientists, farmers, and policymakers worldwide. In the U.S. alone, bee pollination is estimated to be worth $8-12 billion. While bee declines have occurred in the past, researchers believe this one is much more severe.

Citation: Mary J. Palmer,Christopher Moffat, Nastja Saranzewa, Jenni Harvey, Geraldine A. Wright, Christopher N. Connolly. Cholinergic pesticides cause mushroom body neuronal inactivation in honeybees. Nature Communications. 4, Article number: 1634. doi:10.1038/ncomms2648.

A new study has pinpointed some of the probable causes of bee deaths CCD

Your Bees Are Dying

The mysterious mass die-off of honey bees that pollinate $30 billion worth of crops in the US has so decimated America’s apis melliferapopulation that one bad winter could leave fields fallow. Now, a new study has pinpointed some of the probable causes of bee deaths and the rather scary results show that averting beemageddon will be much more difficult than previously thought.

Scientists had struggled to find the trigger for so-called Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) that has wiped out an estimated 10 million beehives, worth $2 billion, over the past six years. Suspects have included pesticides, disease-bearing parasites and poor nutrition. But in a first-of-its-kind study published today in the journal PLOS ONE, scientists at the University of Maryland and the US Department of Agriculture have identified a witch’s brew of pesticides and fungicides contaminating pollen that bees collect to feed their hives. The findings break new ground on why large numbers of bees are dying though they do not identify the specific cause of CCD, where an entire beehive dies at once.

When researchers collected pollen from hives on the east coast pollinating cranberry, watermelon and other crops and fed it to healthy bees, those bees showed a significant decline in their ability to resist infection by a parasite calledNosema ceranae. The parasite has been implicated in Colony Collapse Disorder though scientists took pains to point out that their findings do not directly link the pesticides to CCD. The pollen was contaminated on average with nine different pesticides and fungicides though scientists discovered 21 agricultural chemicals in one sample. Scientists identified eight ag chemicals associated with increased risk of infection by the parasite.

Most disturbing, bees that ate pollen contaminated with fungicides were three times as likely to be infected by the parasite. Widely used, fungicides had been thought to be harmless for bees as they’re designed to kill fungus, not insects, on crops like apples.

“There’s growing evidence that fungicides may be affecting the bees on their own and I think what it highlights is a need to reassess how we label these agricultural chemicals,” Dennis vanEngelsdorp, the study’s lead author, told Quartz.

Labels on pesticides warn farmers not to spray when pollinating bees are in the vicinity but such precautions have not applied to fungicides.

Bee populations are so low in the US that it now takes 60% of the country’s surviving colonies just to pollinate one California crop, almonds. And that’s not just a west coast problem—California supplies 80% of the world’s almonds, a market worth $4 billion.

In recent years, a class of chemicals called neonicotinoids has been linked to bee deaths and in April regulators banned the use of the pesticide for two years in Europe where bee populations have also plummeted. But vanEngelsdorp, an assistant research scientist at the University of Maryland, says the new study shows that the interaction of multiple pesticides is affecting bee health.

“The pesticide issue in itself is much more complex than we have led to be believe,” he says. “It’s a lot more complicated than just one product, which means of course the solution does not lie in just banning one class of product.”

The study found another complication in efforts to save the bees: US honey bees, which are descendants of European bees, do not bring home pollen from native North American crops but collect bee chow from nearby weeds and wildflowers. That pollen, however, was also contaminated with pesticides even though those plants were not the target of spraying.

“It’s not clear whether the pesticides are drifting over to those plants but we need take a new look at agricultural spraying practices,” says vanEngelsdorp.

CCD Monsanto Bee Crisis

Monsanto launches honey bee advisory council

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The buzz around the plight of the honey bees has prompted Monsanto and other stakeholders to form a new advisory council to address bee health, the company announced.

The Honey Bee Advisory Council, which industry experts, was announced at the three-day Honey Bee Health Summit at Monsanto’s Chesterfield Village Research Center this week. The summit was hosted by the $13.5 billion agriculture company and by Project Apis m (PAm), for a crowd of about 100.

Monsanto also rolled out a Honey Bee Health page on its website.

“Healthy honey bees are essential for productive agriculture and the environment,” Jerry Hayes, who runs Monsanto’s bee industry efforts, said in a statement.

Since 2006, colonies of honey bees have been dying off in what’s been known as Colony Collapse Disorder.

An estimated 10 million bee hives, valued at $200 each, have been lost since 2006 — adding up to a total replacement cost of $2 billion, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Overall, the number of bee colonies has dropped to 2.5 million in 2012, from 6 million in 1947. Colony losses this past winter were 31 percent, compared with 22 percent in 2011-12, according to USDA data.

Monsanto and PAm have been working together in California for the last year (in a three-year program) to encourage farmers to plant forage, the food supply for honey bees that is made up of nectar and pollen from flowering plants. Company officials said “year-one” results yielded 450 acres of forage, 130 percent of the goal.

For its part, Monsanto has been investing in bee health in the past several years. In 2011,Monsanto acquired Beeologics, a startup founded in 2007 to develop biological tools for disease control for bees, for $113 million. “If beekeepers let mite pressure get out of control, it becomes an uphill battle and they usually lose,” said Hayes, who is the Beeologics commercial lead.

The Honey Bee Advisory Council is comprised of Monsanto executives and others, including Diana Cox-Foster, a professor at Penn State University; David Mendes, past president of the American Beekeeping Association; Gus Rouse, owner of Kona Queen Hawaii Inc.; and Larry Johnson, commercial beekeper.

Honey Bees and Colony Collapse Disorder 2013

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2013/05/winter-honeybee-losses/

Bee-harming pesticides banned in Europe | Environment | guardian.co.uk

CCD BEES ALMONDS

How Does Colony Collapse Disorder Affect The Almond, Blueberry, Honey Industry?

Why California Is in Desperate Need of Bees

$3.8 billion almond industry may take a huge hit due to colony collapse disorder.

Love isn’t the only thing blooming around Valentine’s Day. So are California’s 800,000 acres of almond blossoms. But scientists warn there may simply not be enough honey bees available to pollinate this year’s crop, which prompts an ominous question: “Is 2013 the year colony collapse disorder (CCD) begins to impact our food supply?”

Mysterious and worrisome bee losses have been on the radar since 2006, but this winter was especially hard on hives, and some experts, like UC Davis entomologist Eric Mussen, predict 2013 could end up as one of the worst honey production years on record. That’s bad news for almond growers, who rely heavily on bees to pollinate the nut trees, and the state’s ag-economy. Almonds are California’s second largest cash crop (behind dairy) and the state’s largest export crop, worth an estimated $3.8 billion.

This is big business. According to Scientific Beekeeping, over a million out-of-state bee hives arrive by pickup truck and semi-trailers to work California’s almond orchards, outnumbering local hives two to one, before leaving to pollinate a rotation of flowering crops in other parts of the country.

So just how bad could the season be? Pretty bad. The U.S. Department of Agriculture says beekeepers have been losing approximately 30 percent of their honey bees each year. But word of hive losses in the 70-90 percent range are being reported this winter—an unsustainable trend for the nation’s commercial beekeepers, and a worrying decline for fruit and vegetable producers, who rely heavily on the tiny workers. For commercial beekeeper Jeff Anderson, whose bees pollinate crops in California and Minnesota, the declines are jaw dropping.

“My operation started last spring with a high count of 3,150 hives. Today I have 992 alive, most in severely weakened condition,” he says.

The nation’s almond crop won’t be the only food impacted.

“Bees pollinate over 95 different types of fruits and vegetables, with almonds being the most prolific,” Paul Towers, spokesperson for the Pesticide Action Network, tells TakePart. “What happens in the almond crop spells good news or bad news for other crops. There’s a ripple effect as commercial bees get moved from almonds to blueberries to cranberries and pumpkins.”

While there’s still no scientifically definitive cause for CCD (some suggest weather, parasites and disease), the finger is increasingly being pointed at a class of pesticides known as neonicotinoids—including clothiandin, thiamethoxam imidicloprid and sulfoxaflor—currently under consideration at the Environmental Protection Agency. As we told you last year, scientists have linked neonicotinoids use on crops to sudden die-offs of honeybees.

The European Commission, on the other hand, recently recommended a two-year suspension of three neonicotinoid insecticides beginning July 1. The U.S. has no such policy, but PAN, along with the Center for Food Safety, Beyond Pesticides and 25 beekeepers filed an emergency legal petition with the EPA to halt use of clothianidin until further studies have been done. The petition was denied.

Monsanto Bee Colony Collapse Information GMO Total Frankenbee fucking bullshit #monsanto #fuckyou #monsantojustsuedme

*Blamed for Bee Collapse, Monsanto Buys Leading Bee Research Firm
Read more here: http://naturalsociety.com/monsanto-bee-collapse-buys-bee-research-firm/

*Monsanto buys leading bee research firm after being implicated in bee colony collapse
Read more here: http://www.naturalnews.com/035688_Monsanto_honey_bees_colony_collapse.html

*Monsanto Genetically Engineering Bees
Read more here: http://dreamingabeautifulworld.blogspot.com/2012/04/monsanto-genetically-engineering-bees.html

Post by: Julie
Join us! http://www.facebook.com/thenwowillfail

Love isn’t the only thing blooming around Valentine’s Day. So are California’s 800,000 acres of almond blossoms. But scientists warn there may simply not be enough honey bees available to pollinate this year’s crop, which prompts an ominous question: “Is 2013 the year colony collapse disorder (CCD) begins to impact our food supply?”

Mysterious and worrisome bee losses have been on the radar since 2006, but this winter was especially hard on hives, and some experts, like UC Davis entomologist Eric Mussen, predict 2013 could end up as one of the worst honey production years on record. That’s bad news for almond growers, who rely heavily on bees to pollinate the nut trees, and the state’s ag-economy. Almonds are California’s second largest cash crop (behind dairy) and the state’s largest export crop, worth an estimated $3.8 billion.

This is big business. According to Scientific Beekeeping, over a million out-of-state bee hives arrive by pickup truck and semi-trailers to work California’s almond orchards, outnumbering local hives two to one, before leaving to pollinate a rotation of flowering crops in other parts of the country.

So just how bad could the season be? Pretty bad. The U.S. Department of Agriculture says beekeepers have been losing approximately 30 percent of their honey bees each year. But word of hive losses in the 70-90 percent range are being reported this winter—an unsustainable trend for the nation’s commercial beekeepers, and a worrying decline for fruit and vegetable producers, who rely heavily on the tiny workers. For commercial beekeeper Jeff Anderson, whose bees pollinate crops in California and Minnesota, the declines are jaw dropping.

“My operation started last spring with a high count of 3,150 hives. Today I have 992 alive, most in severely weakened condition,” he says.

The nation’s almond crop won’t be the only food impacted.

“Bees pollinate over 95 different types of fruits and vegetables, with almonds being the most prolific,” Paul Towers, spokesperson for the Pesticide Action Network, tells TakePart. “What happens in the almond crop spells good news or bad news for other crops. There’s a ripple effect as commercial bees get moved from almonds to blueberries to cranberries and pumpkins.”

While there’s still no scientifically definitive cause for CCD (some suggest weather, parasites and disease), the finger is increasingly being pointed at a class of pesticides known as neonicotinoids—including clothiandin, thiamethoxam imidicloprid and sulfoxaflor—currently under consideration at the Environmental Protection Agency. As we told you last year, scientists have linked neonicotinoids use on crops to sudden die-offs of honeybees.

The European Commission, on the other hand, recently recommended a two-year suspension of three neonicotinoid insecticides beginning July 1. The U.S. has no such policy, but PAN, along with the Center for Food Safety, Beyond Pesticides and 25 beekeepers filed an emergency legal petition with the EPA to halt use of clothianidin until further studies have been done. The petition was denied.

What is Colony Collapse Disorder?

What is Colony Collapse Disorder?

Vanishing Bees

Honey bees are disappearing across the country, putting $15 billion worth of fruits, nuts and vegetables at risk

The list of crops that simply won’t grow without honey bees is a long one: Apples, cucumbers, broccoli, onions, pumpkins, carrots, avocados, almonds … and it goes on.

Without bees to pollinate many of our favorite fruits and vegetables, the United States could lose $15 billion worth of crops -- not to mention what it would do to your diet.

Honey bees are important pollinators for both flowers and agricultural crops.

Beekeepers first sounded the alarm about disappearing bees in 2006. Seemingly healthy bees were simply abandoning their hives en masse, never to return. Researchers call the mass disappearance Colony Collapse Disorder, and they estimate thatnearly one-third of all honey bee colonies in the country have vanished.

Why are the bees leaving? Scientists studying the disorder believe a combination of factors could be making bees sick, including pesticide exposure, invasive parasitic mites, an inadequate food supply and a new virus that targets bees' immune systems. More research is essential to determine the exact cause of the bees' distress.

Although the U.S. Department of Agriculture has allotted $20 million over the next five years for research, that amount pales in comparison with the potential loss of $15 billion worth of crops that bees pollinate every year. And the USDA has so far failed to aggressively seek out a solution.

If we don’t act now to save the honey bee, it might be too late. And no honey bees will mean no more of your favorite fruits and vegetables.

Here’s a list of what bees pollinate:

TAKE ACTION NOW!

URGE USDA TO ACT

Tell the Department of Agriculture to act now to save bees and crops.

WATCH THE VIDEO

Learn more about Colony Collapse Disorder in this video produced for OnEarthmagazine.

WHAT YOU CAN DO

• Make your garden bee-safe
• Read "The Vanishing" inOnEarth magazine

Fruits and Nuts	Vegetables	Field Crops
Almonds Apples Apricots Avocadoes Blueberries Boysenberries Cherries Citrus Cranberries Grapes Kiwifruit Loganberries Macadamia nuts Nectarines Olives Peaches Pears Plums/Prunes Raspberries Strawberries

Silence of the Bees

Silence of the Bees
Introduction

In the winter of 2006, a strange phenomenon fell upon honeybee hives across the country. Without a trace, millions of bees vanished from their hives. A precious pollinator of fruits and vegetables, the disappearing bees left billions of dollars of crops at risk and threatened our food supply. The epidemic set researchers scrambling to discover why honeybees were dying in record numbers — and to stop the epidemic in its tracks before it spread further.

Silence of the Bees is the first in-depth look at the search to uncover what is killing the honeybee. The filmmakers of Bees take viewers around the world to the sites of fallen hives, to high-tech labs, where scientists race to uncover clues, and even deep inside honeybee colonies. Silence of the Bees is the story of a riveting, ongoing investigation to save honeybees from dying out. The film goes beyond the unsolved mystery to tell the story of the honeybee itself, its invaluable impact on our diets and takes a look at what’s at stake if honeybees disappear. Silence of the Bees explores the complex world of the honeybee in crisis and instills in viewers a sense of urgency to learn ways to help these extraordinary animals.

Watch Silence of the Bees on PBS. See more from Nature.

http://www.pbs.org/wnet/nature/episodes/silence-of-the-bees/full-episode/251/

Bee Deviled: Scientists No Longer Bumbling Over Cause Of Colony Collapse Disorder

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/annie-spiegelman/bee-deviledscientists_b_1884294.html

Though worldwide bee health has been on the decline since the 1990s, it wasn't until the fall of 2006 that beekeepers nationwide began noticing millions of bees vanishing from their hives. This syndrome, named colony collapse disorder, or CCD, is characterized by the disappearance of adult honey bees from the hive, leaving the newborns to fend for themselves.

If you're not a huge fan of the bee, why should this matter to you? Well, if you like to eat food, you should be concerned. Besides gathering nectar to produce honey, bees pollinate agricultural crops, home gardens, orchards and wildlife habitat. As they travel from blossom to blossom in search of nectar, pollen sticks to their furry body and is transferred to another flowering blossom enabling it to swell into a ripened fruit. It's estimated that about one-third of the human diet is derived from insect-pollinated plants and three-quarters of all plants on the planet depend on insects or animals for pollination.

Most scientists now agree that the main causes of colony collapse disorder are nutritional stress, pathogens (mites, viruses and fungus), and pesticides. Two recent studies published in Science strengthen the case that a relatively new class of systemic insecticides entitled 'neonicotinoid pesticides' are indeed key drivers behind recent pollinator decline.

Not knowing how to even pronounce the word neonicotinoid,I decided to contact Pesticide Action Network, North America, (www.panna.org) where trained agronomists, chemists, ecologists and analysts track and translate science, making it publicly accessible to the rest of us. I spoke with Heather Pilactic, Panna's Co-Director, about the recent bee die-offs and what consumers can do to support the struggling beekeepers.

According to PANNA's reading of the latest science, these new studies show that pesticides do play a significant role in honeybee deaths. How large a role?

How big a role neonics, or any other bee-toxic pesticides play in CCD and pollinator decline really depends on the situation. The relative contribution of each of these three main causes will vary with location, timing, exposure levels, genetic vulnerability of a hive, etc.in ways that defy meaningful quantification. But the really short answer is "big."

What we do know is that pesticides are absolutely driving bee losses in a number of different ways: Increased herbicide use (driven by RoundUp Ready GE crops) is killing off habitat that bees rely on for nutrition. As for older pesticides, foliar (spray) applications of any number of pesticides while bees are foraging, is still common practice.

Bees are especially vulnerable to many insecticides: when you spray when and where they are eating, they die. New science out of the University of Pennsylvania's bee team shows that adjuvants, or "inert" ingredients that make up the bulk of a pesticide product formulation are impacting bee health as well.

A new class of fungicides -- once rarely used on corn -- have since 2006 been widely promoted as yield boosters. What little we have studied about the effects of fungicides on bees points to their synergistic effects when combined with neonics (as they often are): they increase the bee-toxicity of the latter up to 1,141-fold. The chemistry of yet another new class of fungicides indicates that they have insecticidal effects. Emerging science further points to fungicides as killing off important bee "gut" microbiota -- such as the bacteria that bees rely upon to turn pollen into bee bread, or the friendly bacteria that combat infection.

That's depressing enough but there's more. (Hang in there, pilgrim.) What's all the talk we hear about neonicotinoid pesticides?

Neonicotinoids, covers at least 142 million acres of U.S. countryside, much of it corn -- on which bees rely heavily for protein. As systemics, these insecticides course through plants' vascular systems to be expressed in pollen, nectar and guttation droplets. This class also happens to be very long-lasting, so they are accumulating in the soil, and saturating the environment in ways we have yet to quantify.

The most widely used of these neonicotinoids (imidacloprid, clothianidin, thiamethoxam) are known to be highly acutely toxic to bees, and have a variety of sub-lethal effects ranging from disorientation to memory, immunity and reproductive impairment. These pesticides are clearly making bees sick, and dead -- but so do a lot of other pesticides. What makes these neonicotinoids suspect is that they are known to be highly toxic to bees, pervasive, long-lasting and relatively new. Perhaps coincidentally, the emergence of CCD in the U.S. roughly coincides with the 5-fold increase of the level of neonics used on corn seed: seed companies began marketing seeds treated with a 5X level of neonicotinoids (1.25 mg/seed vs. .25) in 2004.

The peril of the bees is sounding an alarm warning us of environmental degradation but we're be too busy texting, facebooking and watching reality TV to notice. What are they trying to tell us with all that buzzing and disappearing?

Bees are an indicator species. They signal the well being of our broader environment, so their message is important. It is also one that I believe we are capable of receiving. Our generation, and our children's generation face overwhelming environmental issues. How do we process climate change? Water and food shortages? Biodiversity collapse? In a sense, the escape to virtual worlds is understandable. But I think of saving the bees as one of those graspable, manageable things that we can accomplish -- and that when we do accomplish it, the effects will ripple and magnify. If we stop poisoning bees, they will thrive and the world we live in will be more resilient as a result.

Why are you picking on Bayer's clothianidin? Doesn't Bayer make chewable baby aspirin?

Bayer's clothianidin -- which is one of the most toxic substances to bees that we know of -- remains on the market, in our view, illegally. There is no valid field study supporting its registration. The backstory is long and sordid, and we're still on the case. What it comes down to is that EPA has long been using this little-known loophole called "conditional registration" to speed pesticides to market with little or no safety data in hand. According to the Natural Resources Defense Council, of the 16,000 current product registrations: 11,000 (68 percent) have been conditionally registered -- that's 2/3 getting an essentially free pass to market.

So the Environmental Protection Agency tests for safety after the product has been on the market? That's reassuring... I need to go hide under my bed.

Registrants (such as Bayer) are then supposed to submit safety data according to defined criteria on a set deadline. What they do instead is delay, deliberately ignore certain criteria, or otherwise game the system to avoid real oversight. In the case of clothianidin, the field study they submitted was so poorly done as to be laughable -- it had no control and was on the wrong crop (canola instead of corn). EPA originally accepted it, then downgraded it and then neglected to close the loop.

Sounds like the pesticide industry has the EPA by the balls . . .What can the public do to help shift policy decisions that can help bees, beekeepers and people who like to eat safe food?

Our food system has always been a political arrangement in one form or another. What's heartening about the last 5 years or so is that the conversation is widening because folks are realizing that this is a political issue much more so than a lifestyle one. More people are seeing themselves as stakeholders in a rigged food system, and doing something about it. And that's a good thing! That's democracy.

So the MAN is still calling the shots? That's getting so old!

It is true that corporations and wealthy people have too much power in government -- but that won't change unless ordinary people engage the political process. Members of Congress truly are motivated by speaking with constituents who have a story to tell and know their issue. Decision makers still read the local papers, especially opinion pages. Get in the habit of writing letters to the editor, or OpEds. Or, get in the habit of making one phone call a week on one issue or another; before you know it, you'll be getting meetings with decision makers. Nobody can do everything, but we can all choose one thing and do it. For my money, I say, "get informed and get in the ring." Go to our website (www.panna.org) to get engaged, or pick another group working on this issue. What matters is commitment.

What is the "Imminent Hazard" legal claim filed by beekeepers and environmental groups?

"Imminent hazard" is policy-speak for "emergency so pressing that EPA has authority to take immediate action." Bees dying off en masse, year after year, is an emergency by any meaning of the term, and we petitioned EPA urging them to take action on this basis. Earlier this month they declined to do so, sticking to their original 2018 timeline for completing the analysis of neonic's impacts on bees (decisions and implementation would stretch out further still). 
Luckily, members of Congress are starting to pay attention. Senators Gilibrand, Leahy, Whitehouse, and most recently, Markey, have all sent letters to EPA essentially telling the Agency to hurry up.

Homework assignment:

Between now and September 25, 2012 we have an opportunity to respond to EPA's recent decision that "pollinator declines don't present an imminent hazard." We can't wait till 2018 to do more studies on how these toxins are poisoning bees and the rest of us suckers. That's plain lame. Bee die-offs are an emergency requiring immediate action-Sign the petition at: Action.panna.org/dia/action/public/?action_KEY=11359

Buzz Annie at www.dirtdiva.com