Brilliant & educational post from Joe Ballenger - Read the whole thing.
For starters to state the obivous, biotech corps AREN'T responsible:
Neither Bt cotton nor Bt maize requires bees for pollination, but cotton nectar is attractive to them and produces a useful honey. Maize pollen may be collected when other pollen sources are scarce. Pre-release honey bee biosafety tests have been conducted for each Bt crop registered in the United States, including Cry9C maize and Cry3A potatoes. Each test involved feeding bee larvae and sometimes adults with purified Cry proteins in sucrose solutions at concentrations that greatly exceeded those recorded from the pollen or nectar of the GM plants in question. In each case, no effects were observed. The rationale for requiring larval and not adult bee tests is questionable, because adult bees ingest considerable quantities of pollen in their first few days post emergence. Larvae, particularly later instars, also consume pollen along with jelly secreted by nurse adult bees, but only recently have there been attempts to quantify pollen ingestion by individual larvae. Other studies with bees fed purified Bt proteins, or pollen from Bt plants, or bees allowed to forage on Bt plants in the field have confirmed the lack of effects noted by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Post-release monitoring programs are now underway to assess impacts of North American GM crops on pollinators under commercial field conditions.
To summarize:
There are a lot of factors involved in colony collapse disorder, and it’s unlikely that there is ‘One True Cause of Colony Collapse’. There are a lot of things that correlate with the symptoms and timelines, but we have to start to separate these. Above, I’ve shown a lot of things that correlate with collapsing colonies… but at the same time, so did my high-school graduation. A correlation can shed light on some details of the problem, but this isn’t the same thing as causation. We know that similar incidents have happened before, but they were a lot more localized than the current set of events. Pesticides, pathogens and environmental factors are likely to be involved but we’ve really got no idea what role these factors play at the current time. There’s good progress being made, but it’s still too early to know why it’s happening this time around.
While we might not know exactly why honeybee colonies are dying, there are a lot of good entomologists trying to figure out what factors are involved in Colony Collapse.
For starters to state the obivous, biotech corps AREN'T responsible:
Neither Bt cotton nor Bt maize requires bees for pollination, but cotton nectar is attractive to them and produces a useful honey. Maize pollen may be collected when other pollen sources are scarce. Pre-release honey bee biosafety tests have been conducted for each Bt crop registered in the United States, including Cry9C maize and Cry3A potatoes. Each test involved feeding bee larvae and sometimes adults with purified Cry proteins in sucrose solutions at concentrations that greatly exceeded those recorded from the pollen or nectar of the GM plants in question. In each case, no effects were observed. The rationale for requiring larval and not adult bee tests is questionable, because adult bees ingest considerable quantities of pollen in their first few days post emergence. Larvae, particularly later instars, also consume pollen along with jelly secreted by nurse adult bees, but only recently have there been attempts to quantify pollen ingestion by individual larvae. Other studies with bees fed purified Bt proteins, or pollen from Bt plants, or bees allowed to forage on Bt plants in the field have confirmed the lack of effects noted by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Post-release monitoring programs are now underway to assess impacts of North American GM crops on pollinators under commercial field conditions.
To summarize:
There are a lot of factors involved in colony collapse disorder, and it’s unlikely that there is ‘One True Cause of Colony Collapse’. There are a lot of things that correlate with the symptoms and timelines, but we have to start to separate these. Above, I’ve shown a lot of things that correlate with collapsing colonies… but at the same time, so did my high-school graduation. A correlation can shed light on some details of the problem, but this isn’t the same thing as causation. We know that similar incidents have happened before, but they were a lot more localized than the current set of events. Pesticides, pathogens and environmental factors are likely to be involved but we’ve really got no idea what role these factors play at the current time. There’s good progress being made, but it’s still too early to know why it’s happening this time around.
While we might not know exactly why honeybee colonies are dying, there are a lot of good entomologists trying to figure out what factors are involved in Colony Collapse.
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