I've done a lot of arsenic analyses in bees in the U.S. Its been many years
since I've looked at the historical data, but I dug much of it out in the
70s.
Paris Green was invented by a Swedish chemist, Carl Scheele, around 1775 -
actually he invented Scheele's Green, as a pigment. Paris Green or Emerald
Green was a later modification. Both have been used as insecticides. It took
until the 1830s to develop a method of analysis sensitive enough to pick it
up on sprayed fruit.
The original insecticides were based on inorganic elements like arsenic,
copper, lead, sulfur. Surprisingly, no one thought that spraying a plant would
pose a threat to bees. They assumed that only insects eating leaves/stems
would be affected.
Similary, Scheele's Green and Paris Green were use in wallpapers as
colorants and in the glue. It turned out that children in Italy in the 1890s were
poisoned by aresenic, especially in damp climates with lots of mildew.
The inorganic insecticides were used from the late 1800s through WWII, when
DDT and other organic insecticides came into widespread use (especially post
war).
In orchards of the NW, we can still pick up arsenic residues in soils and in
bees. During the early 1900s, beekeepers also discovered that the same
toxic chemicals as used in inorganic pesticides were also released by many
industrial processes, such as copper smelters.
I suspect that your 1891 reference is probably about right. There wouldn't
have been any way to detect it until the 30s, and in general, it took some
time to for it to occur to anyone that arsenic poisoning could occur in ways
other than direct consumption of the poison.
Because of industrial bee kills, the authorities on arsenic and the
poisoning of bees were Maurizio in Europe and another group of scientists in Utah
(both from the 1940s-60s). Their published papers reference the older
literature on arsenical pesticides - it took some time to figure out that industrial
sources of arsenic could have the same effects as arsenical spraying, and it
was some time before anyone thought to analyze the bees near heavy industry.
The beekeepers knew that it was something in the 'smoke'; they didn't know
that the smoke could include things like arsenic.
FYI, we have had industrial poisoning of bees, cattle, and horses from
arsenic - in MT while I've been at UM I've been involved in several studies and
served as an expert witness for the affected beekeepers.
Jerry
Jerry
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