Second trial replicating CCD with neonicotinoids.

[Jon]

All God's creatures have a place in the choir.

[Johnthefarmer]

To summarise your collective responses: until there is a convincing trial (maybe double-blind, placebo control, long term ,randomised, peer reviewed etc. etc) of neonics available at no higher concentration than 6 ppb. to multiple colonies in a field realistic situation, you won't accept that these new pesticides, which are now used globally on a huge scale, are having any significant negative impact on insect populations in general, and honeybees in paticular.

Who would fund such a trial?

[Johnthefarmer]

who would fund such a trial?

The NHS, BBC , Richard Branson, Mother Teresa,
Welcome Foundation, Carnegie Trust, Barclays Bank?

Or do we just accept a real-time, world-wide trial, with the results to follow...?

[Neils]

The obvious point is that the real-time trial is ongoing and doesn't, currently, support the more outlandish trial results. Again, there are serious lab studies, under realistic dose conditions, around honey and bumble bees that definitely need more detailed and realistic field studies to see whether what's currently being suggested by those results translate into more realistic studies.

As for funding, if you're going to chuck rhetorical questions up in the air, why not the soil association and NFU. It's farmers who use the stuff after all. The Agro chemical companies can stump up some funds to clear their products too.

You're the farmer, lobby your kin to stop using the stuff rather than try to coerce us to lobby them on your behalf.

[Bumble]

no, not tonight. it's just a kinda, you know, gut feeling...

I mised this last night and I'll admit that a gut feeling, on the back of what I think is flawed research, isn't going to tempt me to get worried. I'm more likely to listen to an experienced beekeeper whose livelihood depends on the decisions they make.

You're quite right, the Japanese trial was on clothianidin and dinotefuran ,which they spray on rice paddies against stinkbug. This is rare in UK.

They hypothecate that the whole colony is disrupted in many different ways by the neurotoxins depending on dose level and duration. Immediate deaths, requiring bees to change jobs, weakened immune systems, queen stops laying, etc. eventually ccd.

I'd agree that rice paddies and stinkbugs are, currently, as rare as hens teeth here in UK, but, with the amount of rain we've had this year, you never know what novel crops some enterprising farmers, allotmenteers or back garden veg growers will be planning to plant next year.

I wonder how many would visit a beekeeping website to learn of the hypothetical pitfalls.

I am quite taken aback by the responses on this thread to evidence of commercial products used to stop stinkbugs affecting rice , albeit in Japan, which are found to produce, under controlled conditions, all the symptoms of ccd over a month or three.

I'll bite, because I don't know the answers to a couple of questions.

How realistic it is to, over a continuous period of a month or three, feed bees an insecticide of any strength?

How many treatments of this particular pesticide, of what strength and over what timespan, would normally be applied to an area under rice production?

... until there is a convincing trial (maybe double-blind, placebo control, long term ,randomised, peer reviewed etc. etc) of neonics available at no higher concentration than 6 ppb. to multiple colonies in a field realistic situation...

Excellent, sounds a perfect trial. It might be expensive, unless there's an enthusiastic farmer who also has access to bees, who could do it in their spare time?

Or maybe it would be worthwile believing the evidence of those who continue to take their bees to forage on 'contaminated' crops without any ill effects?

[gavin]

Oh dear. I've just read the article. What appallingly naive drivel! I don't know how this sort of garbage gets into the scientific literature. It speaks volumes for the Japanese Journal of Clinical Ecology if nothing else. Maybe the authors are trying to get themselves tenure at Harvard or something (for those who followed the dismemberment of the Lu paper on Bee-L or elsewhere).

The CCD researchers in the US don't believe that pesticides are a main cause of CCD. This is bee poisoning, pure and simple. The researchers have just shown that you can poison bees quickly with massive doses of insecticide, and you can poison them slowly with unrealistically high doses of insecticide. Their attempt to link this to CCD just shows that they don't understand what that means.

Here is the abstract:

Abstract
Recently it has become a serious problem that honeybees suddenly vanish in their colony, which is referred to as a colony collapse disorder (CCD). We have made it clear by the field experiments for about four months what effect neonicotinoid pesticides such as dinotefuran and clothianidin have on the occurrence of CCD. Eight colonies consisting of about ten-thousand honeybees in each colony were investigated under the practical beekeeping conditions in our apiary. In this study foods containing dinotefuran of 1 ppm to 10 ppm or clothianidin of 0.4 ppm to 4 ppm were fed into a beehive. Three levels of concentration were 10 (middle-conc.) 100 and (high-conc.) 50 (low-conc.) times lower than that in practical use. The changes of adult bees, brood and the pesticide intake in each colony were directly examined. They suggest that each colony with the pesticide administered collapses to nothing after passing through a state of CCD, the high-concentration pesticides seem to work as an acute toxicity and the low- and middle-concentration ones do as a chronic toxicity. CCD looks mysterious, but it is just one of situations where a colony dwindles to nothing. We have proposed a CCD occurrence mechanism based on our results. The NMR spectral analyses of dinotefuran and clothianidin in aqueous solution give the speculations that both are thermally stable under the heating condition of 50 °C ×24 hours and dinotefuran is radiationally stable under the ultraviolet-irradiation condition of 310 nm×50 W/m but clothianidin is unstable.

[Jon]

Yes perhaps the question for JTF should be 'how do you know this study is not simply demonstrating that insecticide is toxic to insects and that the efficiency of the kill is directly related to the dosage applied.'
The same question can be asked of the Harvard study which did not manage to kill any of the colonies until the dosage was changed from field realistic half way through and racked up by a factor of hundreds.
In fact someone, might have been Randy Oliver, made the comment that is nothing else it showed how resilient bees are to Imidacloprid as it took months to kill off the colonies even at a ridiculously high dose.

Naive is the word if you think these studies add to our knowledge of the interactions between pesticides, bees and other pathogens.

[Jon]

Looks like the badger shills have managed to infiltrate the highest levels of government to get the cull postponed. Probably a few posting on this forum masquerading as beekeepers or anti pesticide campaigners. Keep your eyes and ears open peeps. These guys are clever. Smarter than your average black and/or white mammal. Never look one straight in the eye.

[Johnthefarmer]

Yes perhaps the question for JTF should be 'how do you know this study is not simply demonstrating that insecticide is toxic to insects and that the efficiency of the kill is directly related to the dosage applied.'
The same question can be asked of the Harvard study which did not manage to kill any of the colonies until the dosage was changed from field realistic half way through and racked up by a factor of hundreds.
In fact someone, might have been Randy Oliver, made the comment that is nothing else it showed how resilient bees are to Imidacloprid as it took months to kill off the colonies even at a ridiculously high dose.

Naive is the word if you think these studies add to our knowledge of the interactions between pesticides, bees and other pathogens.

Clearly the consensus on this forum is that neonicotinoids, when used responsibly, are of little, or no, threat to honeybees or other nice insects. That's all fine, then.

You'd better be right because millions of acres are treated every year. This stuff builds up.

[Johnthefarmer]

.

I'll stand by what I've said before - if UK bees are dying and colonies are collapsing because of what's being put on Oil Seed Rape seeds then why are beekeepers, both hobby and commercial, still taking their colonies to fields of the stuff?
.

Could it not be that these beekeepers are, understandably, not aware of the insidious effects of sub-lethal chronic poisoning?

Afterall, most of the effects of environmental pollution on us humans are not immediately lethal. They are debilitating over time, leading to functional problems, sometimes fatal, months or often years after initial exposure.

Tobacco, asbestos, aluminium, radiation, lead, diesel fumes etc. are such examples of slow-burn effects which have killed millions of us, but took years, sometimes hundreds , to recognise as primary causes.

My own view is that neonics probably share this highly-contested, difficult-to-prove quality of delayed doom.