Posted on 07/26/2016 10:02:09 PM PDT by Olog-hai
A new study finds that a commonly used insecticide kills much of the sperm created by male drone honey bees, one reason why the bees are dwindling.
The class of insecticide called neonicotinoids didn’t kill the drones. But bees that ate treated pollen produced 39 percent less live sperm than those that didn’t, according to a controlled experiment by Swiss researchers published Wednesday in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
It essentially acted as an accidental contraceptive on the drones, whose main job is to mate with the queen — but not one that prevented complete reproduction, just making it tougher, said Lars Straub, lead author of the study and a doctoral student and researcher at the University of Bern. …
(Excerpt) Read more at hosted.ap.org ...
Never had wax moths, but have always feared wax moths. They can take out a colony quick.
I found the beetle traps work well, but the beetles are not as devestating as the moths or mites.
lol
Fantastic show, 2nd 2 hours IIRC
http://www.coasttocoastam.com/shows/2016/07/nature-environment-earth-changes
Pollution Reduction Devices/ Dwindling Bees
Sunday - July 17, 2016
Interview with beekeeper in Canada who figured out what was killing his bees. Unbelievable! Such detailed things!
He went into each type of bee, how they work, what they need, what affects them, on and on.
He first had trouble when some Amish! near him who had never used GMO things before, used it once.
What he ended up doing was just at the time the bees would be going to those certain things, he diverted them with some kind of nourishment!
IIRC [I have it recorded because it was so good]
Um... please explain the mechanism by which "GMO products" cause harm to bees or any other beneficial form of life? And please explain how GMO organisms produced by modern targeted forms of gene insertion/deletion/alteration are worse than the old methods of gene modification which involved indiscriminate gene breakage, random mixing of genes from different organisms, and propagation of obvious genetic mutants?
I get annoyed to see all the anti-GMO hysteria. It consists of a lot of emotionally driven fear-mongering tempered by very little fact and no data.
The only GMO I can think of that *might* be toxic to bees would be the insertion of the Cry gene from Bacillis thuringiensis. That would be no more and no less toxic than the widespread application of live B. thuringiensis to crops. However, a quick perusal of the scientific literature reveals that the Cry toxins are very specific to certain insect species--which do not include honeybees.
“Probably wasted billions of tax dollars teaching bees to jerk off into a cup.”
uh..., you don’t have to teach them.
We bee keepers know differently! And we are all experiencing dead hives. The "no conclusion" stems from the fact that there does not seem to be one factor (cause) that we can point to. I can tell you that 2 winters ago we lost almost 40 hives. We had absolutely NO Nosema in those hives, as we send samples to the state lab for testing. They did report that we had a higher than usual Varroa Mite count. Yet other apiaries report losses from Nosema.
There seems to be several causes and they many times overlap..... GMOs, neonicotinoid pesticides, Nosema fungus, Varroa mites, hive beetles, and other pests, and stress from transporting them long distances for huge pollen purposes.
Please don't be so flippant in dismissing this very real problem as a non story.
But what about dead bee sperm?
And I would like to see impartial data - impartial being the operative word- guaranteeing the safety of GMO and GEO organics.
I’m not a scientist - not even a college graduate, but it seems to me that altering food sources in such a way that they are able to tolerate over spraying with Roundup should at least be questionable. I certainly don’t want to ingest it.
The
What happens if weeds develop resistance to Roundup? Will farmers have to resort to stronger herbicides, say, in the way stronger antibiotics are needed to treat antibiotic resistant infections in humans?
What pollinates those crops which have been over sprayed? Where does the pollen go that is collected by those insects to bring into the hive as protein to feed to their young?
Some of it may wind up in my hives, in my honey.
Re: the beetle traps - are you using the ones with the oil in the little trough thing?
Do you require impartial data for all of the food you eat? Because, in a very real sense, it ALL is genetically modified. Until recently, no one ever cared whether the genetically modified food that they have consumed for their whole lives is safe.
Farmers thousands of years ago began to genetically modify food by selectively breeding genetic mutants that had favorable qualities. They also discovered how to artificially force plants to breed with each other that would never naturally mate, and came up with all kinds of results. Those early methods of genetic engineering were crude and unfocused; anything could happen. The way plants use their genes could be altered in unpredictable ways. Our modern methods allow us to change just one gene--instead of all of them. It's far more controlled, and we can predict exactly what the result will be.
A natural tomato is a tiny red berry that is about the size of a nightshade berry (tomatoes are, in fact, a species of nightshade). If you eat one of those giant purple streaked bumpy monstrosities that are sold as "heirloom" tomatoes, are you worried over whether that mutated tomato has been tested for safety before being sold on the market?
I'm not a scientist - not even a college graduate, but it seems to me that altering food sources in such a way that they are able to tolerate over spraying with Roundup should at least be questionable. I certainly don’t want to ingest it.
Roundup works by stopping the function of a single enzyme, a protein, that plants require to survive. The molecule glyphosate, the active ingredient of Roundup, attaches to the enzyme and stops it from working. The Roundup resistant plants have had a bacterial enzyme gene inserted in place of the plant enzyme gene. The bacterial enzyme gene is as natural as the plant enzyme gene, and the enzyme works the same. The only difference is that when the glyphosate molecule attaches, it sticks in a way that does not block the enzyme function. So the plant does not die. If you want to read the original scientific article that explains how Roundup resistance works, it is here.
Disclaimer: I am a scientist. I've spent more years in university studying the molecular basis of living processes than I care to think about (Ph.D.). I actually do medical research, but the basic processes of life are pretty much the same among all living organisms.
The What happens if weeds develop resistance to Roundup? Will farmers have to resort to stronger herbicides, say, in the way stronger antibiotics are needed to treat antibiotic resistant infections in humans?
Resistance is a problem. Pests will always develop resistance, and we will always be looking at new ways to combat the pests. The advantage of Roundup is that it allows farmers to control weeds without overly damaging the soil. Without Roundup, if no substitute is found that is as safe for animals as Roundup is, then farmers will have to go back to the soil-damaging ways they used before Roundup.
What pollinates those crops which have been over sprayed? Where does the pollen go that is collected by those insects to bring into the hive as protein to feed to their young?
Some of it may wind up in my hives, in my honey.
The pollen from plants that have been engineered to use the bacterial enzyme instead of the native plant enzyme will be used by the bees exactly the same way as the pollen from plants with the plant enzyme. When bees consume the pollen from either source, their digestive systems chop up the proteins to make amino acids and chop up the DNA to make nucleotides.
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