While it has been talked about sevaral times for not doing in past,...I was pleased to see it out in open again, being deeply looked at, as similar used to be talked about by Carl A. Johansen & Daniel F. Mayer way back in about 1990, but this new talk below goes further, in a way linking not only synergistic hazzards of chemicals in general, but also now!!!...... drugs 
used in beehives, which technically too are chemicals not to be mixed with 
others, but somehow often done by man.......

So I was pleased to get this forwarded to me, and now those here can go and read more for what DAdant is alerting too!!

Dee A. Lusby


Subject: ABJ Extra - Newsletter Nov 2, 2011 A widely used bee antibiotic
may harm rather than help

A Widely Used Bee

Antibiotic May Harm

Rather Than Help

Honey bee populations have been mysteriously falling for at least five
years in the United States, but the cause of so-called colony collapse  
disorder (CCD) is still largely unknown.

In a report published Nov. 2 in the online journal PLoS ONE, researchers
report that a widely used in-hive medication may make bees more  
susceptibleto toxicity of commonly used pesticides, and that this interaction may be at least partially responsible for the continuing honey bee population  loss.

The researchers, led by David Hawthorne of University of Maryland,
pre-treated healthy honey bees with the antibiotic oxytetracycline, and  
then exposed the bees to two pesticides that are commonly used in bee hives to control parasitic varroa mites. In both cases, the pre-treated bees were much more sensitive to pesticide exposure than were bees that had not been treated.

The team suspected that oxytetracycline may interact with specific bee 
proteins called multiple drug resistance (MDR) transporters, making  them less effective and therefore rendering the bee more at risk to the  pesticides.

To test this hypothesis, they pre-treated the bees with another drug, 
verapamil, which is known to inhibit a particular MDR transporter. These insects showed increased sensitivity to five different pesticides, supporting  the group's theory that MDR transporters, and specific combinations of independently safe chemicals, may play an important role in CCD.

Citation: Hawthorne DJ, Dively GP (2011) 'Killing Them with Kindness?
In-Hive Medications May Inhibit Xenobiotic Efflux Transporters and Endanger
Honey Bees'. PLoS ONE 6(11): e26796. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0026796

Financial Disclosure: This work was supported by the United States
Department of Agriculture. The funders had no role in study design, data
collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the 
manuscript.

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