BEES

[Unorthodox]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2015/03/05/we-dont-know-that-pesticides-are-killing-the-bees-but-we-know-enough-to-worry/

Honeybees are important for more than just making honey. They also pollinate a lot of our crops — one-third of them, in fact. But a common narrative emerging these days is that the bees are dying. Beekeepers have reported losing substantial fractions of their colonies each winter over the past decade or so. In other cases, piles of dead honeybees have turned up.

Environmental and other public-interest groups often cite pesticides as a leading culprit. In particular, they want regulators to ban a specific group of pesticides known as “neonicotinoids.” Activists argue that these pesticides not only kill honeybees, but may be behind the different, more mysterious set of symptoms known as colony collapse disorder (CCD). This week, 125 public-interest groups asked the Environmental Protection Agency to consider pulling these pesticides from the market.

How responsible are pesticides for the plight of honeybees? We don’t have much clear-cut evidence. But that lack of evidence shouldn’t offer us comfort. Here’s why.

Neonicotinoids’ bee impacts, in a nutshell
Neonicotinoids are a relatively new form of pesticide designed to target aphids, termites and other pests. What makes them unique is that they’re systemic — the plant itself actually absorbs the pesticide into its leaves and tissues. That helps farmers because they don’t need to repeatedly spray their crops with the chemicals.

But the pesticide also ends up in pollen and nectar, which honeybees consume. Laboratory studies have shown that the neonicotinoids can kill bees. And in recent years, some research has shown that some neonicotinoids have subtler, “sublethal” impacts on bees, harming their flying or food-foraging abilities.

And still more research has found that neonicotinoids could induce at least some of the symptoms of CCD, although these findings have proved to be controversial. In CCD, adult worker bees abandon a colony, but the queen bee and immature bees remain; few dead bees, if any, are found outside the hive.

Case closed? There are a few reasons why it’s more complicated than it seems. First, pesticides’ effects on individual bees don’t necessarily equate to the effects on a colony. Thousands of bees live together, collectively functioning as a super-organism. And this super-organism can still keep functioning even if some of its members get sick or die.

Additionally, bees in nature are exposed to dozens of other pesticides and other hazards such as habitat destruction and parasites, all of which may work together to hurt them. It’s also worth noting that bee deaths aren’t a one-size-fits-all proposition; not all of beekeepers’ recent colony losses are caused by CCD. Piles of dead bees are sometimes confused with CCD as well.

What we don’t know
Given those factors, would banning neonicotinoids cut losses of bee colonies? Not all scientists are convinced. And we still don’t have much evidence that neonicotinoids themselves are linked specifically to CCD. Here’s why that’s no reason to rest easy: We may lack evidence right now. But that dearth of evidence could stem from gaps in the scientific methods that regulators rely on.

To go on the market here or in Europe, pesticides must pass tests called “risk assessments” to show that they wouldn’t be unacceptably toxic to humans or wildlife. Among the creatures for which regulators study pesticides’ risks are honeybees. The problem: Traditional lab tests on bees told us only how much pesticide it takes to kill them, while ignoring impacts on behavior, flight or foraging abilities. The tests also didn’t necessarily tell us what would happen at the colony level, in the long term, or with multiple pesticides at a time.

The Environmental Protection Agency and the European Food Safety Authority have been working to address these problems. They’re trying to improve bee risk assessments by adding a round of field studies; these would be performed in the event that laboratory tests raise any red flags. These field studies, although cumbersome and expensive, could tell regulators how real-world doses of pesticides affect whole colonies. Regulators also want to use new laboratory tests to identify other red flags — such as longer-term/”chronic” effects and sublethal effects — that would trigger these field tests. But many of these tests aren’t ready for use just yet.

To bee, or not to bee banned?
What do we do about the neonicotinoids, then? It boils down to how cautious we want to be. The European Union decided it wasn’t going to take any chances, so it banned neonicotinoids for two years, saying not only that the pesticides can kill bees but that they may carry other risks we aren’t aware of yet.

But in the United States, the burden is on regulators to show that a pesticide is unacceptably risky before they can ban it. And in many cases, regulators here can give pesticides an early stamp of approval if some risk data is missing. This practice of “conditions registrations” has proved controversial, including for the neonicotinoid pesticide “clothianidin.”

In short, there are a lot of potential ingredients that could be driving honeybee deaths. But we still don’t know exactly what this lethal recipe is, especially in the case of CCD and winter colony losses. If pesticides — and neonicotinoids, specifically — are involved, however, they may not be acting alone. And it’s unclear whether barring them would save the bees. But the scientific gaps we see here illustrate an important fact: Absence of evidence doesn’t always mean evidence of absence.

Aside from the whole bees pollinate 1/3 crap (yes, and no), good article. 

[Unorthodox]

http://www.takepart.com/article/2015/03/04/4-million-people-just-told-obama-save-bees-now

Billions of bees have died in recent years, and now more than 4 million people have called on President Barack Obama to ban neonicotinoid pesticides linked to the mass die-off of insects that pollinate a third of the world’s food supply.

Conservationists presented the petition to the White House Wednesday in advance of a report from a presidential task force that will make recommendations later this month on how to avoid further collapse of honeybee populations.

The coalition of 125 groups—including 11 of the nation’s top environmental organizations—gathered the signatures in an effort to keep pressure on the administration to take action.

“We’re urging President Obama to take meaningful action on neonicotinoids, which are devastating bee populations,” said Larissa Walker, pollinator campaign director at the Center for Food Safety. “These systemic insecticides are also threatening the nation’s food supply.”

TakePart partnered with CFS, the Pesticide Action Network North America, and Beyond Pesticides, in a yearlong “Save Our Bees” campaign.

The presentation of the petition was timed with the reintroduction in Congress of the Saving America’s Pollinators Act, which would suspend the use of four of the most toxic neonicotinoids until the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) conducts a full review of their safety.

“The EPA plans to wait until 2018 before reviewing the registration of neonicotinoids,” Representative John Conyers, D-Mich., said in a statement. “But America’s bees cannot wait three more years. Neither can the thousands of farmers that rely on pollinators. Our honeybees are critical to ecological sustainability and to our economy.”

related
Colony Collapse Disorder Is Not What You ThinkPaul Towers at the Pesticide Action Network said he is hopeful yet wary about the presidential bee panel’s forthcoming recommendations.

“If officials choose to put forth unenforceable, voluntary, or advisory practices, defer responsibility to state agencies through weak pollinator plans, or create weak changes to pesticide labels, they will have failed to address the problem of dramatic bee declines,” Towers said. “Obama’s Pollinator Health Task Force has the opportunity to head the call of farmers and beekeepers and create a strong and enforceable plan of action, addressing not only acute bee kills, but also broader bee declines.”

[Unorthodox]

http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-31709115

Wild bumblebees are infected with many of the diseases found in honeybees looked after by bee keepers, according to a national survey.

With wild bees already under threat from habitat loss and pesticides, diseases could have a profound impact on populations, say scientists.

In Britain, bumblebee species are declining, and two have become extinct.

Conservation groups are calling for tougher regulations on importing bees for commercial use.

Continue reading the main story
“
Start Quote
We need to consider the use of pesticides, increasing food resources so planting more wild flowers for all our pollinators, but also the diseases that are being brought in and transmitted between wild and managed bees”
End Quote
Vanessa Amaral-Rogers
 
Buglife
 Researchers at Royal Holloway, University of London, collected hundreds of free flying honeybees and wild bumblebees in 26 areas of England, Wales and Scotland.

Analysis revealed that five common viruses which cause disease in honeybees are circulating in bumblebees.

More needs to be done to protect both wild bees and commercial honeybees, said a team led by Prof Mark Brown of the School of Biological Sciences at Royal Holloway, University of London.

"Our findings reveal the widespread prevalence in wild bee populations of multiple RNA viruses previously associated with honeybees," the researchers report in the Journal of Animal Ecology.

Together with other environmental factors, such as habitat loss and pesticides, diseases could have a "profound impact on the long-term health of bee populations," they said.

Practical measures
 
In the UK there are 24 species of bumblebee but only eight are commonly found in most regions. Bumblebees have been declining due to a shortage of flowers to feed on and places to nest in the countryside.

Native honeybees living in the wild have largely disappeared, due to diseases and mites, such as the Varroa mite.

 
Mites are a major threat to honeybees
However, many honeybees looked after by bee keepers forage in the countryside and urban habitats, where they may come into contact with wild bumblebees.

Vanessa Amaral-Rogers of the insect charity Buglife said diseases found in honeybees were another factor to consider in bumblebee conservation.

"We need to consider the use of pesticides, increasing food resources so planting more wild flowers for all our pollinators, but also the diseases that are being brought in and transmitted between wild and managed bees," she said.

The research adds to growing evidence that multiple environmental pressures are driving the loss of bees in the wild and in hives.

In a review of evidence published last week in the journal Science, biologists at the University of Sussex called for practical measures to protect bees including:

incorporating flower-rich habitat into farmland
reducing pesticide use
bringing in quarantine measures for bees shipped from country-to-country
better monitoring of wild bee populations.
Follow Helen Briggs on Twitter.

THIS is more scary than the honeybees.  Like to see a similar study in the US. 

[Unorthodox]

http://www.columbian.com/news/2015/mar/05/bees-merge-memories-brian-williams/

Even bees 'merge' their memories
Research with bumblebees sheds light on humans
 By Geoffrey Mohan, Los Angeles Times

Published: March 5, 2015, 6:00 AM
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Bumblebees are just as guilty of merging memories as NBC anchor Brian Williams, it turns out.

A new study, published online in the journal Current Biology, suggests that Bombus terrestris is prone to a type of memory error common among humans — melding information from two episodes into one.

Bees may not be able to tell tales about being under fire in flights over Iraq, but they do demonstrate remarkable memory ability. And because they have a mere 960,000 neurons compared with the human complement of about 85 billion, they probably need to economize on storage and processing.

That's what makes them valuable models to researchers trying to find the roots of complex brain functions in the simpler structures preserved across species over many millions of years of evolution. After all, many studies have demonstrated that memory is formed on a cell-by-cell basis.

Lars Chittka, a behavioral ecologist at Queen Mary University, London, has been probing the limits of bees' memories in the lab. He and colleague Kathryn Hunt were curious about how bumblebees processed episodic memory. So they trained bees to respond to rewards doled out by artificial flowers: one yellow, another with black and white concentric circles.

Afterward, the bees were given three choices — the same flowers on which they were trained and a third that merged characteristics of both.

Not surprisingly, bees tested soon after the trials tended to remember the last reward (the order of the test flowers was swapped between groups). So, if a bee was trained on yellow most recently, the bee flew to the yellow flower at rates far higher (77 percent to 79 percent) than would be explained by chance alone.

But as time went on, the bees started showing a greater propensity to choose the hybrid flower.

The researchers added complicated choices and varied colors and combinations, testing whether bees were just generalizing for such factors as "yellowness," whether certain patterns were inherently more attractive, and whether memory and learning were stronger for certain colors or patterns.

The result that stood out most was that bees seemed to prefer a merged stimulus over the long haul. Their long-term memory, in other words, seemed to meld two separate events.

"Such memory errors are quite well-established in humans," Chittka said. "We tend to think that our memory is, in general, accurate, and where it's inaccurate we have a perception that it just fades and we might have forgotten something. But there is a quite a lot of complete mis-remembering, merging, mixing things up. In the courtroom this can have serious consequences."

Beyond sinking a career, such errors can prove deadly. So, it's a bit of a stretch to think that evolution would have selected for the trait, Chittka said.

"But it's very possible that these errors are a byproduct of useful memory processes," he said.

Extracting common elements from various episodes helps us learn rules that govern our environment, preparing us for similar experiences. That ability is fundamental to higher cognition, in fact.