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A Purdue University study shows that honeybees collect the vast majority of their pollen from plants other than crops, even in areas dominated by corn and soybeans, and that pollen is consistently contaminated with a host of agricultural and urban pesticides throughout the growing season.
Christian Krupke, professor of entomology, and then-postdoctoral researcher Elizabeth Long collected pollen from Indiana honeybee hives at three sites over 16 weeks to learn which pollen sources honeybees use throughout the season and whether they are contaminated with pesticides.
The pollen samples represented up to 30 plant families and contained residues from pesticides spanning nine chemical classes, including neonicotinoids - common corn and soybean seed treatments that are toxic to bees. The highest concentrations of pesticides in bee pollen, however, were pyrethroids, which are typically used to control mosquitoes and other nuisance pests.
"Although crop pollen was only a minor part of what they collected, bees in our study were exposed to a far wider range of chemicals than we expected," said Krupke. "The sheer numbers of pesticides we found in pollen samples were astonishing. Agricultural chemicals are only part of the problem. Homeowners and urban landscapes are big contributors, even when hives are directly adjacent to crop fields."
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"If you care about bees as a homeowner, only use insecticides when you really need to because bees will come into contact with them," she said.
Organic vegetables with a few insect-caused holes taste better than unblemished supermarket ones.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 01 2016, @12:13AM
(Score: 2) by mhajicek on Wednesday June 01 2016, @02:50AM
True, but preserving the pollinators could be a matter of life and death for the human species.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 01 2016, @07:09AM
(Score: 2) by Joe Desertrat on Wednesday June 01 2016, @06:31PM
Controlling the spread of mosquitoes can be a matter of life and death in many parts of the world. Malaria, dengue fever, zika fever, chikugunya, Japanese encephalitis, yellow fever, filariasis, West Nile fever, and many more dangerous diseases are carried by them.
The real problem seems to be that we are changing conditions to allow these diseases to affect more people and to spread to places not evolved to handle them. There are a lot of ways that occurs, from bringing the diseases out of the treetops by clear cutting forests, to blanket spraying that harms the populations of the predators of the disease carrying pests faster and more thoroughly than the pests themselves, to moving people into new habitats and by moving the pests themselves into new habitats, to name just a few.