Pesticides Blamed for Killing Honeybees

B.C. has seen gloriously sunny weather for most of this Summer. But something is missing this year… Bees!! Could this be one factor contributing to low crop yields, besides the unseasonally cool rainy Spring and recent hailstorms?
The suspect: Clothianidin, a pesticide produced by Bayer CropScience, subsidiary of German chemical giant Bayer AG. It’s used to coat corn, sugar beet and various seeds. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency reports that, “clothianidin has the potential for toxic chronic exposure to honey bees, as well as other pollinators, through residues in nectar and pollen.” It appears that clothianidin “works its way through a plant and attacks the nervous system of any insect it comes into contact with,” reports The Guardian.
About a third of the food we eat requires bee pollination, valued at $1 billion in Canada annually, according to the Toronto Star. The Niagara region of Canada experienced a sudden loss of millions of bees last Spring. “About 80 or 90 per cent of the beekeepers in the Niagara region have had substantial losses.”
Reports on the bee population have not surfaced in B.C. yet. Two of Bayer CropScience’s products, Prosper and Poncho, contain clothianidin and are registered with the B.C. Ministry of Agriculture and Lands.
The Niagara region, however, is not an isolated incident.
The Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental group with regional offices throughout the U.S., has just filed a lawsuit as part of an effort to find out how diligently the EPA is protecting honeybees from dangerous pesticides. “In the last two years, beekeepers have reported unexplained losses of hives – 30 percent and upward – leading to a phenomenon called colony collapse disorder,” according to The San Francisco Chronicle. $15 billion of U.S. crops have been affected.
The German Federal Office of Consumer Protection and Food Safety (BVL) suspended the registration for eight pesticide seed treatment products used in rapeseed oil and sweetcorn this Summer. The German Professional Beekeepers’ Association found that “50-60% of the bees have died on average and some beekeepers have lost all their hives.” Tests on dead bees showed that 99% of those examined had a build-up of clothianidin.
Bayer’s product, Gaucho, has been banned as a seed dressing for sunflowers in France since 1999. One-third of French honeybees reportedly died as a result of widespread use of Gaucho.
Bees are an important part our food chain and better care needs to be taken in our agricultural policies and standards. The University of Georgia puts it well in a brief on the economic impact of pollination, adapted from a study by Delaplane, K.S. & D.F. Mayer (2000):

For fruit- or nut-bearing crops… it’s the degree and extent of pollination that dictates the maximum possible number of fruits. Because of its yield-optimizing benefits, bee pollination can play an important role in maintaining a sustainable and profitable agriculture with minimized disruptions to the environment.
Alterations in agricultural practices that significantly reduce yield rates have the danger of encouraging more wild lands to be converted into farmland to make up for reduced yields. Good bee pollination and optimized crop yields are thus part of a sound environmental management policy.
The economic value of bee pollination goes beyond production agriculture because bees pollinate more than just crop plants. Bees pollinate more than 16 percent of the flowering plant species in the world.
Bee pollination sustains native and introduced plants that control erosion, beautify human environments and increase property values.