With Pollinator Declines, Millions at Risk of Malnutrition

Source: Eleanor

Cornucopia | Feb 2, 2015 | EurekAlert! by University of Vermont

A new study shows that more than half the people in some developing countries could become newly at risk for malnutrition if crop-pollinating animals — like bees — continue to decline.

Despite popular reports that pollinators are crucial for human nutritional health, no scientific studies have actually tested this claim — until now. The new research by scientists at the University of Vermont and Harvard University has, for the first time, connected what people actually eat in four developing countries to the pollination requirements of the crops that provide their food and nutrients.

“The take-home is: pollinator declines can really matter to human health, with quite scary numbers for vitamin A deficiencies, for example,” says UVM scientist Taylor Ricketts who co-led the new study, “which can lead to blindness and increase death rates for some diseases, including malaria.”

It’s not just plummeting populations of bees. Scientists around the world have observed a worrisome decline of many pollinator species, threatening the world’s food supply. Recent studies have shown that these pollinators are responsible for up to forty percent of the world’s supply of nutrients.

The new research takes the next step. It shows that in some populations — like parts of Mozambique that the team studied, where many children and mothers are barely able to meet their needs for micronutrients, especially vitamin A — the disappearance of pollinators could push as many as 56 percent of people over the edge into malnutrition.

The study, “Do Pollinators Contribute to Nutritional Health?” was led by Alicia Ellis and Taylor Ricketts at UVM’s Gund Institute for Ecological Economics and Samuel Myers at the Harvard School of Public Health. It appears in the Jan. 9 issue of the journal PLOS ONE.

The “hidden hunger” associated with vitamin and mineral deficiencies is estimated to harm more than 1 in 4 people around the globe, the scientists note, contributing to increased risk of many diseases, reduced IQ and diminished work productivity. “Continued declines of pollinator populations could have drastic consequences for global public health,” the team writes.

“This is the first study that quantifies the potential human health impacts of animal pollinator declines,” says Myers. Earlier studies have shown links between pollinators and crop yields — and between crop yields and the availability of food and nutrients. “But to evaluate whether pollinator declines will really affect human nutrition, you need to know what people are eating,” Myers explains. So the new study examined the full pathway from pollinators through to detailed survey data about people’s daily diets in parts of Zambia, Mozambique, Uganda and Bangladesh.

“How much mango? How much fish?” says Ricketts. “And from that kind of data we can find out if they get enough vitamin A, calcium, folate, iron and zinc.” Then the scientists were able to examine the likely impact a future without pollinators would have on these diets.

And for parts of the developing world, that future could well include “an increase in neural tube defects from folate deficiency or an increase in blindness and infectious diseases from vitamin A deficiency,” Myers says, “because we have transformed our landscapes in ways that don’t support animal pollinators anymore.”

“We find really alarming effects in some countries for some nutrients and little to no effect elsewhere,” Ricketts says. On the bleak end of the spectrum, the team projected little difference in Bangladesh, since so many people there are already malnourished. And, at the other end of the spectrum, Zambia should be relatively insulated from this risk. That’s because — though the scientists project reductions in the intake of vitamin A with pollinator declines in Zambia — “there is so much vitamin A in the diet already that it didn’t push very many people below the threshold,” Myers explains.

This new study fits into an emerging field of research exploring how the very rapid transformation of Earth’s natural systems affects human health. The big picture? “Ecosystem damage can damage human health,” Ricketts says, “so conservation can be thought of as an investment in public health.”

Glyphosate & Honeybees, interview with Don Huber 2014

The Institute for Responsible Technology | Feb 2, 2015

Jeffrey Smith talks to Don Huber about the effects of glyphosate and the dwindling bee population.

Pesticide Industry Seeks to Leverage Power Through EU-US Trade Deal

"The pesticide industry’s proposal hides its true aim:
to weaken, slow, or stop efforts to protect people
and the planet from exposure to toxic chemicals,"
said report co-author Erica Smith. 
(Photo: CGIAR/flickr/cc)

Common Dreams | Jan 8, 2015 | Andrea Germanos

Organziation's new report details how industry proposal puts environment, food safety at risk

The pesticide industry is leveraging its power to push forth a proposal for a pending EU-US trade deal that would put the environment and human health at risk, according to a new report.

The analysis (pdf) by the Washington, DC- and Geneva-based Center for International Environmental Law (CIEL) looks at recommendations (pdf) from pesticide lobby groups CropLife America and the European Crop Protection Association (ECPA) to negotiators for the Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) to align regulatory standards by lowering them to US levels rather than increasing them to the stronger safeguards in EU.

The proposal from CropLife America and ECPA, groups that represent the interests of BASF, Bayer, Dow, DuPont, Monsanto, and Syngenta, states: "A harmonized risk assessment framework for pesticide regulation is necessary to ensure the highest level of consumer and environmental protection, while promoting international trade, creating jobs, and enhancing social and economic viability of the EU and the US."

Erica Smith, co-authof the CIEL reports, stated, "Using words like ‘harmonization’ and ‘cooperation’ the pesticide industry’s proposal hides its true aim: to weaken, slow, or stop efforts to protect people and the planet from exposure to toxic chemicals."

The report, Smith and co-authors David Azoulay and Baskut Tuncak write, "reveals the extent to which the pesticide industry is willing to go to maximize profits."

Specifically, the report states, the proposal would:

• Change EU laws to permit the use of carcinogens and other substances of very high concern as pesticides, posing a health hazard to workers, consumers, and communities;
• Allow the import of food from the US with higher levels of toxic pesticides;
• Weaken, slow or stop efforts to regulate endocrine (hormone) disrupting chemicals;
• Obstruct efforts to save bee populations, risking irrevocable damage to the quality and quantity of our food supply;
• Block access to information that is vital to developing non-toxic alternatives;
• Interfere with the democratic process b y usurping the regulatory authority of US States and EU Member States;
• and Install a "regulatory ceiling" hampering global pesticide regulation

Rather than adhering to the EU's hazard-based approach based on the precautionary principle, CropLife and ECPA's proposal would open the floodgates in Europe to scores of pesticides that are known carcinogens or contain hormone disrupting chemicals and that are banned in the EU but currently allowed in the US, the authors write.

As for how the groups' proposal would thwart the development of non-toxic alternatives, the report states that it would encourage the use of "exclusive use" periods. The report explains:

Exclusive use periods under US law allow for the concealment of regulatory data for a minimum of 10 years after registration. During the exclusive use period, only the provider of data may use or gain access to that information for the purpose of supporting additional studies or registrations, effectively blocking public access to data and information that could illustrate risks and lead to the development and commercialization of safer alternatives to hazardous pesticides.

A woman holds a sign at an anti-TTIP
demonstration in October 2014.
(Photo: Garry Knight/flickr/cc)

Also potentially thwarting less harmful alternatives is the industry's proposal for aligned standards on protection of confidential business information, which would include information claimed by companies as "trade secrets."

"Access to information regarding the identity of chemicals is vital for the identification of hazardous properties and for the generation of health and safety information regarding those properties, enabling scientists to develop safer solutions," the report states.

Absent from CropLife America and ECPA's proposal is any mention of regulatory "harmonization" happening as a result of the US adopting more stringent EU standards, the report notes.

The US and EU positions on the pesticide industry's recommendations have not yet been disclosed, CIEL states.

Even without the industry proposal, the TTIP had faced previous criticism by environmental groups based on a leaked text of the deal that included "least trade restrictive" measures that would be a boon to corporations but would threaten fair and safe food for consumers. Further, the Center for Food Safety issued a report on TTIP dangers in May 2014 highlighting that "harmonization" could weaken standards, and put food safety on both sides of the Atlantic at risk.

The European greens have opposed the deal as it stands, as well, based in part on its risk to environmental and food safety. They also warned against giving President Obama fast track authority, also known as Trade Promotion Authority, which would hasten the deal's passage through Congress. That authority has received increased attention as a result of another pending trade deal, the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

The release of the CIEL report coincides with a step towards transparency regarding the TTIP. Following repeated criticism over the deal's secrecy, the EU trade commissioner published the EU's negotiating documents for the trade deal.

The next round of TTIP negotiations are set to take place in Brussels next month.

Canadian Beekeepers Launch Class Action Suit Against Pesticide Makers

A bee enjoys a Cosmos flower in Toronto. 
(Photo:  postbear eater of worlds)

Common Dreams | Sep 4, 2014 | Andrea Germanos

"It was time to get serious and go after the real villains — the companies profiting from the ecological mayhem."

Beekeepers in the Canadian province of Ontario have launched a class action lawsuit against makers of a class of pesticides linked to the decline of bees.

The claim (pdf) filed Tuesday in the Ontario Superior Court of Justice seeks $450 million in damages going back to 2006 for the "chronic effects of the use of the Neonicotinoids [...] felt by Canada’s Beekeepers annually."

The effort targets agribusiness giants Bayer and Syngenta, whom the claims states were "negligent in permitting or failing to prevent the damages caused by the Neonicotinoids to the Beekeepers."

The claim, led by two Ontario-based honey producers and filed by Siskinds LLP, charges that agribusiness giants Bayer and Syngenta's "continued production, marketing and sale of the Neonicotinoids" poses "ongoing" damage. "Beekeepers have suffered, and will continue to suffer, devastating economic hardships as a result of the continued use of Neonicotinoids," it states.

The damages they say are caused by these pesticides, also known as neonics, include: bee deaths; impaired reproduction; immune suppression; behavioral abnormalities resulting in hive loss ; reduced honey production; impacts on the quality of honey; contamination of hive equipment; loss of Queen Bees; breeding stock; and difficulties fulfilling honey product or pollination contracts.

John Bennett, National Program Director of the Sierra Club Canada Foundation, called the launch of the lawsuit "historic news," and explained the lead-up to the suit:

So far we have looked to government and the Pest Management Regulatory Agency to enforce the law, but once I sat down with the head of the Agency and key staff in June it became clear to me that the PMRA is infused with inertia and has no sense of urgency.

So I introduced the beekeepers to Siskinds LLP, an Ontario law firm that specializes in class action law suits. It was time to get serious and go after the real villains — the companies profiting from the ecological mayhem.

The Ontario Beekeepers' Association (OBA), which is not directly involved in the suit, welcomed to effort. “This Action puts the blame where it belongs — on the pesticide manufacturers,” the organization's Vice President, Tibor Szabo, said in statement.

The Canadian Association of Professional Apiculturists (CAPA) reported that Ontario's average level of wintering loss of honey bee colonies over the past winter was 58 percent, far higher than the 15 percent winter loss beekeepers in the country consider an acceptable level.

CAPA's latest annual colony loss report (pdf) adds: "There are concerns amongst some beekeepers, particularly in Ontario and Quebec, that exposure to neonicotinoid insecticides during the spring and summer may lead to increased stress to colonies contributing to winter loss."

The U.S.-based environmental group Beyond Pesticides stated Thursday that the class action suit "demonstrates the desperation of beekeepers everywhere."  The group writes:

While many causes of these honey bee declines have been cited, including a combination of pesticides, parasitic mites, viruses, cold winters, decreased foraging habitat, and the stresses placed on colonies when they are moved among farms, scientists and bee experts agree that neonicotinoids significantly contribute to bee deaths both directly through contact exposure and indirectly through weakening the bees and making them more vulnerable to pathogens and other stressors.

Neonicotinoids, like imidacloprid, clothianidin, and thiamethoxam, have already been given two-year moratorium in the European Union (EU). Despite calls for similar action from beekeepers and environmentalists, Canadian officials, and their counterparts in the U.S., have refused to follow suit. And although some success in the form of local ordinances has occurred in both the United States and Ontario, Canada as well as policy shifts within some U.S. federal agencies, the Canadian beekeeper lawsuit demonstrates the desperation of beekeepers everywhere seeking relief on a broader scale.

This Secret to Massive Yields Could Rock the Farming World

Activist Post | Aug 15, 2014 | Heather Callaghan

According to a new study, it lies in an unpatented technique...

 What will ultimately feed the world? Is it really genetic engineering? Is it biodiversity?

What can maintain and stoke that diversity - I mean, make it really flourish with bountiful food using less land?

Of course, using this discovery might mean severing ties with monolithic Big Ag and chemical corps whose actions could block this dream from becoming reality. Monoculture fans need not apply.

Typical pollination from species like honeybees might be enough to generate a crop, but can we do better? Yes!

New research from North Carolina State University demonstrated that blueberries produced more seeds and larger berries if they were visited by more groups of different bee species. In other words - not just honeybees. Combining their power with that of other species led to astounding results.

Amazingly, this allowed farmers to harvest significantly more pounds of fruit per acre.

The researchers looked at blueberries in North Carolina because it is an economically important and well-understood crop that relies on insect pollination.

Dr. Hannah Burrack, an associate professor of entomology at NC State and co-author of a paper on the research said:

We wanted to understand the functional role of diversity - And we found that there is a quantifiable benefit of having a lot of different types of bees pollinating a crop. [emphasis mine]

And for each bee group introduced, the yield growth and profit appeared to be exponential.

First, the researchers zeroed in on the five different bee species in the regional blueberry fields: honeybees, bumblebees, southeastern blueberry bees, carpenter bees and a functionally similar collection of species that they termed small native bees.

They even tested a mathematical algorithm that found an increase of $311 worth of yield per acre for each additional new species of pollinators. Example: one group would be typical yield, if two bee groups pollinated the field it would boost the yield by $311 per acre; for three bee groups, the boost becomes $622 per acre and so on!

So what is the sum value of each bee group to North Carolina blueberries?

Burrack says:

For North Carolina blueberries as a whole, we calculate the benefit of each group to be approximately $1.42 million worth of yield each year.

Holy blueberries, Batman! Holy bees, more like it. Then again, maybe that's not a lot of dough in ag terms, but think of the yield for the farmer, and think of all the extra food. Not to mention, what it could do for beekeepers and farmers markets.

Colleague and co-author Dr. David Tarpy said:

We think the benefit stems from differences in behavior between bee groups, in part depending on the weather.

Different bees for different weather - an important factor during difficult changing weather patterns.

For example, southeastern blueberry bees work well regardless of inclement weather, whereas honeybees only perform at their best on calm, warm, sunny days.

Burrack adds:

This can make a big difference, since blueberries bloom in March and April in North Carolina. That means the weather can swing from great to awful, as we saw this year. 

We've shown that there is a real financial benefit associated with biodiversity. The next step is to figure out how to foster that diversity in practical terms.

Some research allegedly points to having native, flowering plants near blueberry fields to increase native bee populations over time, but the researchers wish to see what role crop management can play in fostering bee diversity at crop sites - whatever that entails...

This is incredibly good news but more and more studies, including this one from Harvard, are demonstrating that neonicotinoid pesticides are largely responsible for major bee declines. So in order for this bee-diversity finding to rock the world, their health needs to come first - and as you can see, the bees pay it forward to us many times over.

Could this secret be why giant biotech and chemical corps like Monsanto, Bayer and Syngenta undermine studies that implicate their pesticides in Colony Collapse Disorder? And...why they rush to pull the strings behind more studies to "help the bees"? To make matters worse, they blame the farmers when their seeds and chemicals finally show negative consequences - but the farmers are left holding the empty bag.

Do we really want to live in a shriveling monoculture where patented robobees are the only ones able to pollinate - for the right price? Knowing the above would rock agriculture because it would decentralize the monopolistic power system and place it back in the right hands. It would breathe new life into local agriculture and the local economy.

The paper, "Bee species diversity enhances productivity and stability in a perennial crop," was published May 9 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE. Lead author of the paper is Shelley Rogers, a former graduate student at NC State who received an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship to support this work.

Image credit

Heather Callaghan is a natural health blogger and food freedom activist. You can see her work at NaturalBlaze.com and ActivistPost.com. Like at Facebook.

Win! U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service to Ban Use of Bee, Bird and Butterfly-Killing Neonicotinoids

© Natural Society

Natural Society | Jul 28, 2014 | Christina Sarich

Due in part to a petition submitted by the Center for Food Safety (CFS), one government agency has come to its senses, agreeing to eliminate bee and butterfly-toxic neonicotinoids in the Pacific Region of the NW Wildlife Refuges.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) very quietly announced that it will phase out neonicotinoid insecticides (neonics) in wildlife refuges in the Pacific Region, including Hawaii and other Pacific Islands, Idaho, Oregon, and Washington.

Within the new policy, all refuge managers will be asked to exhaust all alternatives before allowing the use of neonics within the lands of the National Wildlife Refuge System. This will be the first US government agency to actually move toward a complete ban that is needed to protect our pollinating insects and birds from possible extinction due to pesticide use.

This monumental step has happened due to a February, 2014 petition filed by CFS asking FWS to ban the use of neonicotinoids on wildlife refuges. (You can see more than 10 other wildlife refuges on the FWS site, here.) The remaining sites will still be unprotected from neonic use. This is; however, a step which could be built upon itself.

Paige Tomaselli, senior attorney for Center for Food Safety states:

“FWS has taken a responsible and necessary first step in the Pacific region, but the agency must permanently institute this policy on all refuge lands across the country. As our legal challenges have repeatedly stated, the costs of these chemicals severely outweigh the benefits; we must eliminate their use immediately.”

The FWS admits to “broad-spectrum adverse effects” of using neonicotinoids, and found the practice at odds with FWS’s policy of Integrated Pest Management (IMP). A study released by CFS earlier this year found that neonicotinoid seeds treatment rarely improved yields for corn and soybeans, corroborating the findings of FWS. Perhaps they can submit their findings to the US Agricultural Department for their review.

The phase out of neonics is to occur by 2016, and refuge managers will have to have an approved Pesticide Use Proposals (PUP) and completed Endangered Species Act consultation documentation before using neonicotinoid pesticides, including the planting of neonicotinoid-treated seed to grow agricultural crops. This is far from a complete ban, but again, a step in the right direction.

The EPA Dithers While a Popular Pesticide Threatens Ecosystems

© Mother Jones

Mother Jones | Jul 18, 2014 | Tom Philpott

Ah, summer—the season when trillions of corn and soybean plants tower horizon-to-horizon in the Midwest. All told, US farmers planted more than 170 million acres in these two crops this year—a combined landmass roughly equal in size to the state of Texas. That's great news for the companies that turn corn and soy into livestock feed, sweeteners, and food additives; but not so great for honeybees, wild pollinating insects like bumblebees, and birds.

That's because these crops—along with other major ones like alfalfa and sunflower—are widely treated with pesticides called neonicotinoids. Made  by European chemical giants Bayer and Syngenta, these chemicals generate a staggering $2.6 billion in annual revenue worldwide—and have come under heavy suspicion as a trigger of colony collapse disorder and other, less visible, ecological calamities.

Last year, the European Union imposed a two-year ban on the chemicals, pending more study of their effects on pollinators. The US Environmental Protection Agency—which originally approved the products through a highly dubious process I laid out here—has stood by these ubiquitous pesticides.

Meanwhile, damning research piles up.

• In a study (press release here) that came out in early July and was published in the peer-reviewed journal Functional Ecology, UK researchers outfitted bumblebees with radio-frequency identification tags, dosed some of them with levels of neonics equal to what they might find in a treated field, and set them outside to observe their foraging behavior. The results suggest that the pesticides impair bees' learning ability: Bees from untreated colonies improved their pollen-collecting ability as they learned to forage, while their neonic-exposed counterparts saw their pollen collection dwindle with time. The takeaway is similar to that of another bumblebee study (my summary here), this one by a different set of UK researchers and published by Nature in 2012. Bad foraging makes bee colonies more vulnerable to a host of threats that confront them: loss of habitat, parasitic mites, and viruses.

• Another study, also released in July, adds weight to the concern that neonics aren't just harming insects, but also birds. In this one, published in Nature and well-summarized by National Geographic, scientists looked at neonic concentrations in water and bird populations over time on Dutch farmland. They found that in the areas with relatively high concentrations of a common neonic called imidacloprid, bird populations "tended to decline by 3.5 per cent on average annually." The evidence is circumstantial—they proved that neonics are correlated with, but not the cause of, bird declines. But the case is pretty damning: The declines began in the mid-'90s, when neonics were introduced; and the correlation with neonic concentrations held up when the researchers controlled for other factors that could cause bird decline, like changes in crop type and amount of fertilizer used. The authors conclude that neonics may have "cascading effects" on ecosystems—by poisoning insects en masse, they harm the other species that feed on them, including birds. In that way, neonics are reminiscent of the "persistent insecticides in the past"—a reference to the harsh, now-banned chemicals like DDT that Rachel Carson thundered against in her seminal 1962 book Silent Spring.

• The Silent Spring analogy got a depressing boost earlier in the summer when a group of European scientists called the Task Force on Systemic Pesticides released a comprehensive analysis of the recent science on neonics' ecosystem effects. Their conclusion, published in the peer-reviewed Environmental Science and Pollution Research: "Population-level impacts have been demonstrated to be likely at observed environmental concentrations in the field for insect pollinators, soil invertebrates and aquatic invertebrates." Translation: the stuff is likely not just killing bees, but also earthworms and water bugs like dragonflies. "The evidence is very clear. We are witnessing a threat to the productivity of our natural and farmed environment equivalent to that posed by organophosphates or DDT," Jean-Marc Bonmatin, of the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) in France and one of the 29 international researchers who conducted the four-year assessment, told The Guardian. "Far from protecting food production, the use of neonicotinoid insecticides is threatening the very infrastructure which enables it."

I asked the Environmental Protection Agency for comment on its neonic stance amid such withering criticism. "The EPA will continue monitoring the open literature and other data sources for further developments on this issue," the agency replied in a statement. Meanwhile, it is painstakingly reviewing its approval of each of the major neonicitinoid products, the first of which won't be completed until 2016-'17.

Environmentalists sue California for ‘rubber stamping’ use of honeybee-killing pesticides

Reuters / Heinz-Peter Bader

RT | Jul 11, 2014

Three environmental and food safety nonprofits are suing the California Department of Pesticide Regulation (DPR) over its approval of insecticides linked to the massive die-off of honeybees in the state, saying the agency violated state laws by doing so.

The Pesticide Action Network North America, the Center for Food Safety, and Beyond Pesticides joined together to file the suit in a California Superior Court. They point to current research blaming the cause of Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD), the disease killing off honeybees and threatening pollination of the world’s crops, on two popular insecticides.

The two products, clothianidin and imidacloprid, are both types of neonicotinoids. Another study found that bees exposed to "field-realistic" doses of neonicotinoid insecticides gather less than half the pollen that they normally do, dooming their young to starvation.

Neonicotinoids were developed in the 1990s to boost yields of staple crops such as corn, but they are also widely used on annual and perennial plants in lawns and gardens. Researchers believe the neonicotinoids are causing some kind of unknown biological mechanism in bees that in turn leads to CCD.

"In 2006, honeybees began dying at unprecedented rates," the groups stated in their 46-page complaint.

"Today, whether honeybees will survive and recover in America is uncertain, and so we have reached the point of agricultural and environmental crisis. About one-third of the food we eat - and an even greater proportion of our overall nutrition - comes from plants that will not make fruit or seed unless they are pollinated by a bee. The crisis is especially acute in California, because we are the largest producer of crops that require honeybees for pollination, including our most valuable crop: almonds."

CCD has killed tens of millions of honeybees in the US, with annual death rates of about 30 percent. Since 2006, around 10 million beehives at an average value of $200 each have been lost, according to a 2013 US Department of Agriculture study. Honeybees pollinate more than 100 US crops – including apples, zucchinis, avocados, and plums – that are worth more than $200 billion a year. CCD is threatening the existence of those crops.

“None of this is news” to the DPR, the suit claims. In 2009, the agency initiated a “reevaluation” of the use of neonicotinoids in the state. “Over five years later, DPR’s reevalution remains ongoing with no end in sight, and DPR has taken no significant steps to protect honeybees. And DPR’s foot dragging is only part of the problem.”

“Pending its reevaluation, DPR has not hesitated to make the existing problem worse by expanding the use of neonicotinoids without any meaningful analysis of the impact to bees or feasible alternatives, in violation of the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) and other laws,” the court documents said. “DPR’s actions are consistent with the agency’s illegal pattern and practice of rubber-stamping applications to approve new pesticides without first complying with laws enacted to ensure they are safe.”

The lawsuit focuses on the DPR’s mid-June decision to expand the use of two neonicotinoids - Venom Insecticide and Dinotefuran 20SG. The group of petitioners is asking the court to put a hold on the approval of the two insecticides until the reevaluation is complete.

The DPR has approved 15 new neonicotinoid products or expanded uses for existing products since 2012. In the agency’s approval reports, the DPR failed to analyze the direct and cumulative impacts that approving these pesticides would have on honeybees and other pollinating insects in light of the agency's past and future decisions regarding neonicotinioid use, the lawsuit says.

The European Commission adopted a two-year moratorium on the use of three neonicotinoid pesticides in 2013. Scientists are using those two years to determine whether the ban helps stop declines in bee populations, after which the restriction may be reviewed. US officials have stated that they don’t have enough evidence to ban neonicotinoids.

The Center for Food Safety filed a legal brief in December in support of a lawsuit backed by many organizations that seeks a reversal of the US Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) May 2013 decision to approve sulfoxaflor, a neonicotinoid. That lawsuit is the first to invoke the US Endangered Species Act to protect bees, claiming the EPA violated the act by not sufficiently considering the impact of pesticides on honeybees and other imperiled wildlife categorized as threatened or endangered under federal law.

Monsanto Indoctrinating Kids At the Zoo

© TruthStream Media

TruthStream Media | Jun 18, 2014 |Melissa Melton / Aaron Dykes

Melissa and I visited the St. Louis Zoo, in Monsanto’s hometown, and found that they and other leading corporate donors were actively “educating” children, families and groups about the natural world, including the causes of bee colony collapse and the rapid mass disappearances of Monarch butterfly populations.



We passed by the Monsanto Lecture Hall, Monsanto Education Center and went inside the Monsanto Insectarium… I guess the conquerors always celebrate the things they dominate and destroy, putting their fleeting beauty and grace on full display.

The saturated propaganda and overt corporatism could not be missed… Melissa kept wondering if there was anything in this town Monsanto hadn’t bought.

Bees Are More Crucial to Modern Agriculture Than Fertilizer

Bee Pollinating Almond Flowers
Credit: Tiago J. G. Fernandes

Cornucopia.org | Jun 13, 2014 | Becky Ferreira \ Motherboard

Bees are more integral to a successful harvest than fertilizer, according to a  new PloS ONE study. Researchers, led by Alexandra-Maria Klein of the Albert-Ludwigs-Universität, discovered that disrupting insect pollination affected almond tree yields far more than restricting nutrients and water.

Klein, along with her colleagues at the University of California, exposed three sample groups of almond trees to different levels of pollination. One group was pollinated by insects without intervention, while the blossoms of a second group were caged, preventing insects from reaching them. The third group was pollinated by hand.

In addition to the pollination variables, Klein’s team treated one group of trees to a standard helping of water and fertilizer, and compared its yields to a group that was given no fertilizer and very little water. Each experiment was conducted in isolation, but the team also studied the manipulated variables in combination to better observe their effects on almond yields and nutritional quality.

The results were dramatic. The trees with caged blossoms barely produced any fruit, but the nuts that did bloom were abnormally large. The hand-pollinated group produced the most nuts, but they were all markedly undersized. The insect-pollinated trees were right in the Goldilocks zone, agriculturally speaking, and they outperformed the other groups by a factor of about 200 percent.

The team also discovered that trees deprived of fertilizer and water were able to make up for the loss over the short-term by subbing in stored nutrients. But no such flexibility was shown for the lack of insect pollinators, making bees and their blossom-loving cohorts a more valuable factor in the success of a crop yield.

Claire Brittain, one of the authors of the study, explained why insect pollination is so much more effective than other pollination techniques. “Most almond varieties are self incompatible,” she told me in an email. “For this reason, farmers plant two or three varieties in a single orchard. Insect pollination produces better yields because their movement between trees in the orchards helps to transfer pollen from other varieties to the almond flowers.”

The finding further confirms that colony collapse disorder will have disastrous effects on agricultural yields. “Almond needs insect pollinators to be able to produce a commercial crop,” said Brittain. “If there is less availability of honey bees in the future farmers will be forced to pay more for renting honey bee hives. This may in turn increase the price for consumers.”

Given that climate change is also throwing bees off their pollination game, this issue is sure to become more pronounced in the coming decades. For now, Brittain and her colleagues are busy brainstorming novel ways to encourage pollinators to lend their talents to flowering crops.

“One step we are exploring is how to bolster insect pollinators around almond orchards by providing them with floral resources before and after almond bloom,” she said. “This is being done as part of the ICP project which is working on habitat enhancements for crop pollinators across multiple crops in the US.”

Bees and other insects may be small in stature, but their impact on our food supply is clearly enormous. Addressing the multiple problems raised by their declining numbers is paramount, because humans are nowhere near as accommodating about restricted nutritional intake as almond trees.

US honeybee population suffers 'unsustainable' death rate over the winter

Reuters / Vasily Fedosenko

RT | May 17, 2014 |

Nearly one quarter of the US honeybee population died over the winter, according to an annual survey. Beekeepers report the losses remain higher than they consider sustainable, and the death rate could soon affect the country’s food supply.
 
“More than three-fourths of the world's flowering plants rely on pollinators, such as bees, to reproduce, meaning pollinators help produce one out of every three bites of food Americans eat,” the US Department of Agriculture said in a statement about the survey. Bees’ pollinating role adds $15 billion to the value of U.S. crops, including apples, almonds, watermelons and beans, according to government reports.

The study, produced by a partnership between the USDA, the Apiary Inspectors of America and the Bee Informed Partnership, found that 23.2 percent of honeybee colonies died over the winter, which is higher than the “acceptable winter mortality rate” of 18.9 percent.

The good news for the beekeeping and agricultural industries is that the 23.2 percent colony loss rate is lower than that of Winter 2012-2013, where 30.5 percent of colonies died.
 
"Pollinators, such as bees, birds and other insects are essential partners for farmers and ranchers and help produce much of our food supply. Healthy pollinator populations are critical to the continued economic well-being of agricultural producers," Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said in the USDA statement. "While we're glad to see improvement this year, losses are still too high and there is still much more work to be done to stabilize bee populations."

Honeybee hives are generally inactive during the winter, when the colony survives by creating a winter cluster. The bees bundle together for warmth, which self-regulates the internal temperature in the cluster’s center, according to the Back Yard Beekeepers Association. This winter, record cold temperatures, marked by polar vortices sweeping down from the Arctic Circle, may have proved deadly to the bee population.
 
"It was about the worst winter we've had in the past 20 years, for bee management and surviving bees," Jerry Fischer, chief apiary inspector with the Maryland Department of Agriculture, said to the Baltimore Sun. Maryland lost nearly 50 percent of its honeybee population, an increase over previous years, which averaged about a one-third loss annually. Fischer said that many of the colonies he inspected last summer appeared to not have stored up adequate honey supplies to survive the unusually harsh winter.

A Harvard study published earlier in May found that two popular insecticides - both of which are neonicotinoids - are the likely cause of Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD), the disease killing off honeybees and threatening pollination of the world’s crops. The researchers noted that the colder the winter, the more the severe the harm from the insecticides.
 
"With the damning evidence mounting, pesticide companies can no longer spin their way out of this crisis," Michele Simon, a public health lawyer who specializes in food issues, told Reuters.

But neonicotinoid producers, including Bayer AG, Monsanto Co and DuPont, argue that mites - not their products - are to blame for the devastating loss.
 
"Yearly fluctuations in the rate of losses like these only demonstrate how complicated the whole issue of honey bee [health] has become, with factors such as viruses and other pathogens, parasites like varroa mites, problems of nutrition from lack of diversity in pollen sources, and even sublethal effects of pesticides combining to weaken and kill bee colonies," Jeff Pettis, co-author of the survey and research leader of the Agricultural Research Service (ARS) Bee Research Laboratory in Beltsville, Md., said in the USDA statement.

BeeLogics, a Monsanto-owned bee health company and a collaborator on the annual survey, laid much of the blame for the colony collapses on the varroa mite, an Asian bee parasite first found in the US in 1987, Reuters reported.
 
"What is clear from all of our efforts is that varroa is a persistent and often unexpected problem," Dennis vanEngelsdorp, an entomologist at the University of Maryland and the director of the Bee Informed Partnership, said in a USDA ARS statement. "Every beekeeper needs to have an aggressive varroa management plan in place. Without one, they should not be surprised if they suffer large losses every other year or so. Unfortunately, many small-scale beekeepers are not treating and are losing many colonies. Even beekeepers who do treat for mites often don't treat frequently enough or at the right time. If all beekeepers were to aggressively control mites, we would have many fewer losses."

This year’s Colony Loss 2013-2014 survey was conducted differently than in previous years, the researchers noted. It was the first time the scientists focused on summer colony loss as well. From April to October 2013, 20 percent of all colonies managed died, the study found. The combination of winter and summer losses was around 30 percent, vanEngelsdorp told Time. Been Informed Partnership and its collaborators hope the expanded survey will improve their understanding of CCD.
 
"We used to think that winter was the critical period," vanEngelsdorp said in a news release. "But during our field studies, beekeepers told us they were also losing colonies in the summer months. So we expanded the survey and found that, in fact, colonies are dying all year round."

For Bigger, Better Crop Yields - We Need More Varieties of Bees

Activist Post | May 12, 2014 | Heather Callaghan

According to a new study, the secret to bounty is the bees...

What will ultimately feed the world? Is it genetic modification? Is it biodiversity?

Well, what can maintain and make that diversity - even your own garden - flourish? I mean, really overflow with bountiful food using less land?

Dr. Hannah Burrack, an associate professor of entomology at NC State and co-author of a paper on the research said:

We wanted to understand the functional role of diversity - And we found that there is a quantifiable benefit of having a lot of different types of bees pollinating a crop.

The researchers looked at blueberries in North Carolina because it is an economically important and well-understood crop that relies on insect pollination. Typical pollination might do the trick, but can we do more?

New research from North Carolina State University demonstrated that blueberries produced more seeds and larger berries if they were visited by more diverse bee species. Amazingly, this allowed farmers to harvest significantly more pounds of fruit per acre. And for each bee group introduced, the yield growth and profit appeared to be exponential.

 First, the researchers zeroed in on the five different bee species in the regional blueberry fields: honey bees, bumble bees, southeastern blueberry bees, carpenter bees and a functionally similar collection of species that they termed small native bees.

They even tested a mathematical algorithm that found an increase of $311 worth of yield per acre for each additional new species of bee pollinating. Example: one group would be typical yield, if two bee groups pollinated the field it would boost the yield by $311 per acre; for three bee groups, the boost becomes $622 per acre and so on!

So what is the sum value of each bee group to North Carolina blueberries?

Burrack says:

For North Carolina blueberries as a whole, we calculate the benefit of each group to be approximately $1.42 million worth of yield each year.

Holy blueberries, Batman! Holy bees, more like it.

Colleague and co-author Dr. David Tarpy said:

We think the benefit stems from differences in behavior between bee groups, in part depending on the weather.

Different bees for different weather - very important for our crazy weather patterns recently.

For example, southeastern blueberry bees work well regardless of inclement weather, whereas honey bees only perform at their best on calm, warm, sunny days.

Burrack adds:

This can make a big difference, since blueberries bloom in March and April in North Carolina. That means the weather can swing from great to awful, as we saw this year. 

We've shown that there is a real financial benefit associated with biodiversity. The next step is to figure out how to foster that diversity in practical terms.

Some research allegedly points to having native, flowering plants near blueberry fields to increase native bee populations over time, but the researchers wish to see what role crop management can play in fostering bee diversity at crop sites.

This is incredibly good news but more and more studies, including this one from Harvard, are demonstrating that neonicotinoid pesticides are largely responsible for major bee declines. So in order for this bee-diversity finding to apply, their health needs to come first - and as you can see, the bees pay it forward to us many times over.

The paper, "Bee species diversity enhances productivity and stability in a perennial crop," was published May 9 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE. Lead author of the paper is Shelley Rogers, a former graduate student at NC State who received an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship to support this work.

Image credit: Wikimedia Commons, Gordana Adamovic-Mladenovic from Windsor, Canada

Heather Callaghan is a natural health blogger and food freedom activist. You can see her work at NaturalBlaze.com and ActivistPost.com. Like at Facebook.

Organic winemaker risks prison for not using pesticide

The Ecologist | Mar 28, 2014 | Sandra Saadi

An organic farmer in France's Cote d'Or has been prosecuted for refusing to spray insecticide on his vineyard - and is anxiously awaiting the verdict, due on 7th April. He faces 6 months in prison and a €30,000 fine.

A French biodynamic winemaker in Cote d'Or department has been prosecuted for not using an insecticide on his vineyard to prevent infection with the bacterial vine disease flavescence dorée - and is anxiously awaiting the verdit, due on 7th April.

Emmanuel Giboulot, 51, faces up to six months imprisonment and a €30,000 fine for defying a prefectural order forcing winemakers to spray their vines with pesticide against the leafhopper Scaphoideus titanus, the insect responsible for the spread of the disease.

"I refuse to spray a dangerous pesticide that destroys bees among other things. Even the least harmful insecticide against leafhopper kills the auxiliary fauna", he declared.

Official Order to prevent any risk of epidemic

The Prefectural Order was released in June 2013 to fight a hypothetical risk of this contagious grapevine disease. Two hotbeds were discovered in the area in 2005 and 2011 leaving thousands of vines damaged over an area of 12 hectares, about 30 acres.

To avoid a recurrence of the infection, the Prefect of Cote d'Or Department has ordered vineyard owners to spray insecticide on their vines to reduce leafhopper density - stressing that the application should happen only once.

Flavescence dorée (FD) disease appeared in Europe after the leafhopper was accidentally imported from the United States in the early 20th century. It was discovered for the first time in southwest of France in 1958.

Giboulot has cultivated his 10-hectare (25 acre) domaine organically since the 1970s providing "excellent results" without using any chemical products, and without resorting to prophylactic spraying of any kind. He has also been farming biodynamically since 1985.

Found guilty - but final judgment reserved

He was prosecuted under article 125-20 of the Rural Code for breaking a Prefectural Order regarding the fight against regulated animal and plant diseases.

Giboulot's lawyer Benoist Busson, a specialist in environmental law, told the court that the Order was illegal in the absence of any state of emergency.

He also reminded the court that the Order against the vines disease was made in 2003 and revised in December 2013 - it its terms applied only to areas actually at risk of the flavescence dorée disease - and "not the entire Department".

In a first hearing, the judge deemed Mr. Giboulot guilty of a criminal offence for refusing to respect an official order and sentenced him a €1,000 fine, half of it suspended.

The final judgment will be delivered at a hearing on 7th April at the Tribunal de Grande Instance in Dijon.

'Natural products can do the job'

Giboulot insists that vineyards can be protected against leafhopper without damaging the environment using natural products such as ferns, calcined clay and oat straw.

He also stresses that there was no actual outbreak of the disease in the entire Department, so there was no risk in any case.

Both biodynamic and organic farming rules forbid the use preventative pesticide treatments. But in the event of an outbreak, he would have been allowed to use the plant-based insecticide Pyrevert, based on natural pyrethrum from chrysanthemum flowers.

But Pyrevert is non-selective and as well as killing any leafhoppers, it's also toxic to other insects including pollinators such as bees, and benign predatory insects such as ladybirds that feed on aphids - which can also damage vines and reduce yields.

Another group of beneficial insects at risk are Typhlodromus mites, a group of predatory insects that attack red spiders, a serious pest which, like aphids, feed on vine sap.

It's the ecology, stupid

As Denis Thiery, director in the National Institute of Agronomical Research told Le Monde, "Even if Pyrevert is of natural origins it is damaging for the environment. It is a neurotoxin that can affect not just insects, but birds, other animals, even the winemakers, depending on the doses used."

He added that the treatment was also likely to be ineffective: "In reality, the efficacy of these treatments against flavescence dorée, whether natural or conventional, is not great.

"Not all the insects are killed and the epidemic continues to spread quickly. But, like all epidemics, we don't know if the situation would be worse without the treatment."

Diagnose first, spray later - if you have to

Dr Sebastien Bellow, whose PhD thesis is on vines' natural resistance to mildew, said: "To avoid contagious grapevine diseases we must develop reliable diagnostic tools to implement beforehand.

"Many different solutions can be used to do so such as fluorescence - then we can see at an early stage if vines are infected. This diagnostic method is non-destructive and pre-symptomatic." That is, the presence of diseases can be identified before any symptoms are apparent.

The French farmers union, Confederation Paysanne, agrees with this low-impact approach to pest control.

"The insecticide spraying has been made mandatory on large geographic areas despite the absence of a preliminary diagnostic to assess the level of risk of flavescence dorée ...

"These automatic treatments have a short-term effect and will reduce to nothing many years of work to put in place a balanced ecosystem allowing self-regulation of diseases and parasitism."

Support committee and Ecophyto Plan

Giboulot's case has been widely publicised in France. A petition launched by IPSN, the Institute for the Protection of Natural Health, to support his fight with the authorities, has received over 500,000 signatures. Another Change.org petition has gathered over 61,000 supporters.

His Facebook support page has recorded 125,000 Likes. He has also released a video, seen more than 80,000 times, to explain and alert the public to his case which could affect not only winemakers, but all organic farmers. In it he says:

"Farmers should be encouraged to use solutions that protect the environment and shouldn't be subjected to the terror of a judicial punishment. Nothing will change if hundreds of thousands of citizens don't speak up clearly by signing the petition."

France - Europe's biggest agrochemicals consumer

IPSN also denounces the massive preventative use of pesticides in France. Despite the 'Ecophyto Plan' launched in 2008 by the Ministry of Agriculture, France is the biggest agrochemicals consumer in Europe.

The Ecophyto Plan's main objective is to reduce by 50% the amount of pesticide used in France by 2018. But the target will not be reached, the French Minister of Agriculture himself, Stéphane Le Foll, told the responsible Senate Commitee in July 2013.

Green MEP for the region, Sandrine Bélier, deplored Le Foll's admission of failure - and mocked "the nonsense of a system that sentences those who make the brave choice to promote other farming approaches such as the biodynamy."

She says that France's vineyards, which occupy 3.7% of farmland, use 20% of all pesticides and that the intensive spraying is damaging the health of cultivators.

And she believes that sinister forces may be at play, influencing decision-making processes in government: "Automatic use of chemicals is nothing but a decoy expertly maintained to maintain control of a sector with products from agro-chemical industry."

Sandra Saadi is a freelance journalist.

Sign the IPSN petition.

Striking Photographs of the Ancient Tradition of Honey Hunting in Nepal

MY MODERN MET | Mar 5, 2014 | Jenny Zhang

Documentary travel photographer Andrew Newey recently went on an expedition to central Nepal, where he spent two weeks living with the Gurung tribespeople in order to document the ancient art of honey hunting. In these photos, Newey captures the risks and skills involved with this tradition, which few outsiders have seen either in person or in images. Perched precariously on rope ladders, honey hunters risk their lives to gather the honey, using only long sticks known as tangos to knock the honeycomb off the Himalayan cliffside and into baskets, which are then lowered to the ground.

Shot with clarity and thoughtfulness, these striking photographs not only provide a glimpse of the Gurung honey hunters' unique lifestyle, but also serve to chronicle the death of this old tradition. Honey hunting is threatened by several things: the decreasing number of honeybees due to climate change; the dwindling number of honey hunters, as more and more young people in the tribe are reluctant to learn the craft; the growing medicinal reputation of Himalayan honey, which has resulted in the government opening honey-harvesting rights to contractors instead of indigenous tribespeople so that honey can be exported and sold to people in other nations; and the increasing commercialization and offering of "honey hunt tours" to tourists, which leads to the depletion of resources for traditional honey hunters.

Read more..

31 Percent Of U.S. Honey Bees Were Wiped Out This Year – Who Will Pollinate Our Crops?

© TheTruthWins.com

 31 Percent Of U.S. Honey Bees Were Wiped Out This Year – Who Will Pollinate Our Crops?
Aug 4, 2013 | The Truth Wins | Michael Synder

If bees keep dying off at this rate, we are going to be facing a horrific agricultural crisis very rapidly in the United States.  Last winter, 31 percent of all U.S. bee colonies were wiped out.  The year before that it was 21 percent.  These colony losses are being described as “catastrophic” by those in the industry, and nobody is quite sure how to fix the problem.  Some are blaming the bee deaths on pesticides, others are blaming parasites and others are blaming cell phones.  But no matter what is causing these deaths, if it doesn’t stop we will all soon notice the effects at the supermarket.  Bees pollinate about a hundred different crops in the United States, and if the bees disappear nobody is quite sure how we will be able to continue to grow many of those crops.  This emerging crisis does not get a lot of attention from the mainstream media, but if we continue to lose 30 percent of our bees every year it is going to have a cataclysmic effect on our food supply.

The frightening thing is that the bee deaths appear to be accelerating and they appear to be even worse in the UK and Canada…

This past winter was one of the worst on record for bees. In the U.S., beekeepers lost 31 percent of their colonies, compared to a loss of 21 percent the previous winter. In Canada, the Canadian Honey Council reports an annual loss of 35 percent of honey bee colonies in the last three years. In Britain, the Bee Farmers’ Association says its members lost roughly half their colonies over the winter.

“It has been absolutely catastrophic,” said Margaret Ginman, who is general secretary of the Bee Farmers’ Association. “This has been one of the worst years in living memory.”

Scientists have been scrambling to figure out what is causing this, and one study that was recently conducted by researchers at the University of Maryland and the U.S. Department of Agriculture may have some answers…

The study, published July 24 in the online journal PLOS ONE, is the first analysis of real-world conditions encountered by honey bees as their hives pollinate a wide range of crops, from apples to watermelons.

The researchers collected pollen from honey bee hives in fields from Delaware to Maine. They analyzed the samples to find out which flowering plants were the bees’ main pollen sources and what agricultural chemicals were commingled with the pollen. The researchers fed the pesticide-laden pollen samples to healthy bees, which were then tested for their ability to resist infection with Nosema ceranae – a parasite of adult honey bees that has been linked to a lethal phenomenon known as colony collapse disorder.

On average, the pollen samples contained 9 different agricultural chemicals, including fungicides, insecticides, herbicides and miticides. Sublethal levels of multiple agricultural chemicals were present in every sample, with one sample containing 21 different pesticides. Pesticides found most frequently in the bees’ pollen were the fungicide chlorothalonil, used on apples and other crops, and the insecticide fluvalinate, used by beekeepers to control Varroa mites, common honey bee pests.

The particular parasite mentioned above, Nosema ceranae, is extremely destructive to honeybees, and this study found that some pesticides and fungicides make it much more likely that bees will become infected by these parasites…

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 called Nosema 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.

So are these pesticides and fungicides the cause of Colony Collapse disorder?

The authors of the study stated very clearly that they were not making that conclusion.

But it does seem more than coincidental that continental Europe is not seeing bees die in the same kinds of numbers and they have banned many of these pesticides and fungicides.  The following is from a recent article by Christina Sarich…

A study by the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) has labeled one pesticide, called clothianidin, as completely unacceptable for use, and banned it from use entirely. Meanwhile, the U.S. uses the same pesticide on more than a third of its crops – nearly 143 million acres. Two more pesticides linked to bee death are imidacloprid, and thiamethoxam. These are also used extensively in the US, while elsewhere, they have been taken out of circulation.

There are others that are not entirely convinced that pesticides and fungicides are the primary cause of the mass bee deaths that we are seeing.  In some cases, tens of millions of bees are dying all at once.  How could that be caused by pesticides and fungicides?  The following is from a recent article by Arjun Walia…

It’s not just the United States, Elmwood, Canada also recently reported a discovery of over  30 million dead bees. The massive bee deaths in Elmwood came shortly after approximately 50 thousand bees were found dead in an Oregon parking lot.

No matter what the true cause is, we need to find a solution quickly because if we start running out of honey bees we will rapidly be facing a nightmarish agricultural apocalypse.

Just check out the following list of crops that are pollinated by honey bees…

• Apples
• Mangos
• Rambutan
• Kiwi Fruit
• Plums
• Peaches
• Nectarines
• Guava
• Rose Hips
• Pomegranites
• Pears
• Black and Red Currants
• Alfalfa
• Okra
• Strawberries
• Onions
• Cashews
• Cactus
• Prickly Pear
• Apricots
• Allspice
• Avocados
• Passion Fruit
• Lima Beans
• Kidney Beans
• Adzuki Beans
• Green Beans
• Orchid Plants
• Custard Apples
• Cherries
• Celery
• Coffee
• Walnut
• Cotton
• Lychee
• Flax
• Acerola – used in Vitamin C supplements
• Macadamia Nuts
• Sunflower Oil
• Goa beans
• Lemons
• Buckwheat
• Figs
• Fennel
• Limes
• Quince
• Carrots
• Persimmons
• Palm Oil
• Loquat
• Durian
• Cucumber
• Hazelnut
• Cantaloupe
• Tangelos
• Coriander
• Caraway
• Chestnut
• Watermelon
• Star Apples
• Coconut
• Tangerines
• Boysenberries
• Starfruit
• Brazil Nuts
•  Beets
• Mustard Seed
• Rapeseed
• Broccoli
• Cauliflower
• Cabbage
• Brussels Sprouts
• Bok Choy (Chinese Cabbage)
• Turnips
• Congo Beans
• Sword beans
• Chili peppers, red peppers, bell peppers, green peppers
• Papaya
• Safflower
• Sesame
• Eggplant
• Raspberries
• Elderberries
• Blackberries
• Clover
• Tamarind
• Cocoa
• Black Eyed Peas
• Vanilla
• Cranberries
• Tomatoes
• Grapes

Can you imagine life without those foods?

I can’t either.

But if bees keep dying off like this, first those crops will start becoming extremely expensive and then they will start disappearing from our store shelves altogether.

About the author: Michael T. Snyder is a former Washington D.C. attorney who now publishes The Truth.  His new novel entitled “The Beginning Of The End” is now available on Amazon.com.