Hi all

A lot of people act as if this concern over pollinator loss due to pesticides is somehow new. It may be new to them, but it isn't new. I wrote earlier about arsenic poisoning in the 1940s. Here is some more recent information (1977)

Pesticide-induced bee kills have been
escalating with the increased use of pesticides
since the late 1940s. A serious
increase in bee kills began in the early
1960s with the introduction and widespread
use of Sevin, a pesticide highly
toxic to honeybees . 

Bee deaths increased substantially
again in the early 1970s, following
the ban of DDT. The pesticides which
replaced DDT, primarily organophosphates
and carbamates (which include
Sevin), are characteristically twice as
toxic as DDT to honeybees.

A Pollination Crisis?

There are scarcely enough commercial
hives (4.5 million) to pollinate America’s
crops. Currently, pesticides are
killing 2 percent more of the nation’s
bees annually than can be replaced by
reproduction, If, the number of hives
damaged and destroyed each year does
not decrease soon, yields of many key
food crops will suffer considerably.

A prime example of a regional
bee shortage is in California, where half
the U.S. crops requiring pollination are
produced. Since 1972, California
almond pollination has required the
transporting of 100,000 hives from
Oregon, Washington, Nevada, and other
states, in addition to most of its own
500,000 colonies. Yet California still
suffers from an insufficient number of
colonies, and many of the small almond
growers have great difficulty finding
bees to pollinate their crops.

If the number of honeybees killed by
pesticides is not drastically reduced, the
U.S. surely will face significant losses in
fruits and nuts, vegetable seeds, livestock
feed, and other crops within the
next fifteen years. The past halfhearted
attempts to prevent bee kills
from occurring - and the reimbursing
of the beekeepers after they do occur -
has proven ineffective. Laws requiring
the use of less toxic pesticides where
beehives are nearby could significantly
reduce the number of bee kills and
might begin to shift the responsibility
for pesticide damages from the government
and the beekeepers to the farmers
and the applicators.

NOTE:
We are still hearing the same litany, where we won't have enough bees, won't have enough food. The reason that this did not happen is because the pesticides used in the 1970s such as Sevin, Parathion, Malathion, etc, were replaced by the vastly less toxic neonics. 

By the way, it is worth repeating that toxicity is not related to the intrinsic toxicity of the product, but to the amount use *in the field*. So neonics may be far more toxic by the pound than arsenic, but in the field arsenicals are clouds of death. 

Another point is: they were saying at the time that 4.5 million hives was barely enough. Now there are half that, and yet, the job of pollinating still appears to be getting gone. Further, with less hives available, the rental has gone from $20 to $200. Hard to complain about that. 

Pete

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