"Have You Ever Been Bit By A Dead Bee?"

"Have you ever been bit by a dead bee?," was the second most famous line in the classic film "To Have and To Have Not." An article in the Boston Globe this week makes it clear that we are all likely to be bit by a dead bee as Colony Collapse Disorder causes some of our favorite fruits and vegetables to become much more expensive or perhaps completely unavailable. The article cited a Harvard School of Public Health study that linked the crisis in beekeeping to a popular pesticide called imidacloprid.

You may have heard that professional beekeepers move thousands of hives cross country to pollinate such popular crops as apples and blueberries. Bee pollinators are also essential for nut trees, many vegetables, and livestock feed. Researchers have implicated a number of possible causes including mites and viruses, but several years ago French researchers suggested this pesticide as a possible cause.

The Harvard study set up beehives in five locations in Worcester county in 2010 and treated them over 23 weeks with different levels of the pesticide. Half way through the test all the bees were alive, but at the end 15 of 16 treated hives had died. CCD has a strange effect on bees. Instead of dying in the hive in CCD the worker bees fly away and never come home leaving just the Queen, baby bees, and a few guards in the hive. The Harvard test produced the same results. On the other hand, if you sprayed the hive with bee and wasp insecticide, there would be a whole host of dead bees around the hive to get bit by. The Harvard researchers discovered they could destroy a hive with CCD-like symptoms using a dose of the pesticide that was less than is typically used in crops or in areas where bees forage.

Imidacloprid and its chemical relatives are used extensively in the corn fields of America. The Harvard researchers believe that if the bees don't get exposed in the field, they pick up the pesticide as a residue in the high fructose corn syrup that the bee keepers feed them while moving hives. At this point you might want to run to the kitchen and discover just how much of your food supply has high fructose corn syrup.

According to the Globe article "officials at Bayer, the German chemical and pharmaceutical company that produces more of the pesticide than any other company in the world, said that the study was flawed and its findings should be disregarded." Now a good reader should weigh the reliability of its sources, Harvard versus Bayer. Let me help. Harvard is the one that didn't produce Zkylon B for the Holocaust.

The Globe also quotes the EPA that the pesticide continues "to meet the statutory standard of 'no unreasonable adverse effects' on people and the environment." To be fair the EPA has moved up the whole class of pesticides that includes imidacloprid in its review schedule so that a wider study (inevitably with chemical company shills adding there two cents) will be started by the end of the year. The line "no unreasonable adverse effect" makes me think of local author Kristi Marsh who points out in her book Little Changes that no unreasonable adverse effect is not the same as "no adverse effect." Kristi is a cancer survivor who has become an advocate for making your life safer by making little changes in the things you eat, drink, or put on your skin. Her book is available at Paperback Junction and is worth purchasing for both its heartwarming story and the list of "little changes" and websites included at the end. Kristi also maintains a website.

I've been extremely disappointed with the Obama administration's environmental actions and loath the current boobocracy that run the Republican party for Big Oil, Big Chemical, and Big Agra. We all need to become whistleblowers for a cleaner, safer environment. "You know how to whistle, don't you, Steve? You just put your lips together and... blow."