Beekeeper Who Leaked EPA Documents: "I Don't Think We Can Survive This Winter" | Hacker News Reader

Beekeeper Who Leaked EPA Documents: "I Don't Think We Can Survive This Winter"

fastcompany.com

154 pointszoowar35 comments

It makes a good story if you can spin this as a case of EPA ignoring its own scientists as evidenced by a leaked report. But what the report (a public document according to Theobald) actually recommends is not that the pesticide be denied registration, but that it should only be sold with a warning.

"EFED [Environmental Fate and Effects Division of the EPA]expects adverse effects to bees if clothianidin is allowed to drift from seed planting equipment. Because of this and the uncertainty surrounding the exposure and potential toxicity through contaminated pollen and nectar, EFED is recommending bee precautionary labeling."

Grist, Fast Company, and Wired have all gone with the "Leak Reveals EPA ignoring its own Scientists" story. But that story is nonsense and distracts from the real problem; namely, the fact that the so-called leak actually only recommends precautionary labeling. What really needs to be leaked is the memo that explains why EFED's recommendations are so weak in a case where high toxicity is known to occur.

The people buying the pesticides aren't the ones bearing the costs of the adverse effects so whether or not there is a warning label is completely irrelevant.

I think you're thinking that a bee precautionary label would say something like "Warning: Dangerous to Bees," in which case non-beekeeping farmers might not care. I suspect the label would instead mandate that users apply the product in a prescribed manner in order to minimize drift (one of the known causes of toxicity to bees). Pesticides typically come with fairly detailed instructions for proper use. My point, though, was that mandating such a label, in this case, is still not an adequate response on the part of EFED to the problem.

I'm not sure a label mandates much without the stick of stuff penalties behind it - we've seen how well self regulation works before.

I think you're close enough here to the presupposition of both my comments above as makes no difference.

That's why I said the EFED recommendations were too weak; that's why I called it an 'inadequate response.' Let me say it again explicitly: A warning is not good enough. Let me clarify again the original point: The real scandal here is that EFED thinks a warning is good enough.

I grow tomatoes on my fire escape in downtown San Francisco. I had to self-pollinate them with an electric toothbrush. I'm pretty sure this is due to the natural lack of bees in San Francisco, not because of the bee die-off due to this chemical.

So my question to the more agriculture knowledgeable HN'ers: how hard would it be to do self-pollination at scale? I imagine the answer is "impossible." Is that too pessimistic?

It's "possible" ... I saw a program about CCD on PBS. There are parts of China where they've killed off all the bees in traditional farming areas. The video showed entire fields of workers holding jars of pollen and taking feather dusters, swathing them in the pollen, then waving them around the flowers.

Very labor intensive.

That sounds like an excellent use-case for armies of flying nano-bots. Well, what are we waiting for?

Well, first we're waiting for someone to invent flying nanobots. Then we're waiting for someone to successfully convince the public that flying nanobots somehow won't kill us all.

What is a bee if not a miniature flying pollination machine? :)

Seriously? It's was our faith in mankind's ability to engineer its way out of any mess that gave us this miracle pesticide in the first place. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

> Seriously?

Hehe no, no, I was joking. I clearly don't think that armies of flying nanobots are actually a potential solution to this problem.

We could call them... bees.

new-bees?

:-P

And a great excuse for China to develop armies of flying nano-bots without it being too suspicious.

Er, isn't that an excellent use-case for hiring more beekeepers?

Actually, I hope that people's budding interest in hobby beekeeping can help pick up the slack...

I was thinking the other day about the viability of a small business that would install apiaries in peoples back yards, and the hosts would get a share of the honey. The rest would be sold at at markets. A distributed system of bzzzzz. Eh? An article in the nytimes the other day inspired the idea - about how different communities are dropping prohibitions on urban beekeeping. Of course, this article appeared only a few days after another article about bees drinking maraschino cherry juice in Red Hook and producing red metallic-tasting honey.

We had to get rid of our hive from our back yard due to neighbour complaints. Many people think a bee sting is going to kill them.

And for some people [1] it just might.

[1] http://www.hmc.psu.edu/healthinfo/b/beesting.htm

Yeah, but living within 20 metres of a hive doesn't mean anything about risk of getting stung.

Bees are quite happy to fly miles to get their nectar. Most of the bees from our hive visibly flew straight up and away from our area. Since getting rid of the hive, our garden is still full of bees.

I didn't meant to imply their fear was justified. ;)

I think we will be eating many more bananas in the near future.

Of course bananas are under attack by their own potentially devastating blight, so that may need reconsideration.

Somewhat off-topic trivia: Vanilla is the only orchid grown for food, it is native to Central America, but most grown commercially comes from Madagascar. It is dependent, in the wild, on pollination from a particular moth. Since that moth doesn't live in the areas where most vanilla is grown, virtually all commercial vanilla is hand pollinated.

Tomatoes are not normally pollinated by honeybees. They have self-fertile flowers, so generally they pollinate themselves when shaken by the wind. Native bumblebees are sometimes used in greenhouses, and other insects (smaller than honeybees) sometimes play a role.

I don't know about San Francisco, but there are quite a few urban hives in the East Bay. While there are CCD problems in the area with some beekeepers, there still are many bees in the area. I buy commercial honey from Bee Healthy, who keep hives around Oakland.

About the bees you could check with http://www.sfbee.org/beekeeping.html if it's a city-related problem or just a neighborhood/plant related issue. In some busy city-areas in Europe it turns out that bees have more varied resources there than on the often mono cultural countryside.

Thanks for the tip: I will threaten my bees with a toothbrush when they are lazy next year.

Offtopic, but: is it legal to grow tomatoes on your fire escape? If there's a fire, will the people upstairs run headlong into a tomato vine?

I came across this very informative article while googling for the name of the pesticide:

http://www.thenhf.com/article.php?id=598

According to this, issues surrounding bee deaths and clothianidin as well as its predecessor imidacloprid have been known since at least 2003.

Excerpt:

Now the stakes are higher than ever. Tom Theobald's honey crop this year is the smallest he's seen in 35 years of beekeeping. "This is the critical winter for the beekeeping industry. I don't think we can survive," he says. "If the beekeeping industry collapses, it jeopardizes a third of American agriculture."

That's because the giant agriculture industry couldn't produce nearly as much with native bee pollinators alone; instead, the industry relies on beekeepers, who rent out their bees to pollinate everything from strawberries and blueberries to squash and cucumbers.

This is the critical winter for the beekeeping industry. I don't think we can survive.

As a beekeeper, this phrase has meaning that might be overlooked by someone who is not one. It may seem obvious, but the most difficult time for bees is during winter; almost all hive deaths occur during the colder months. In a bad winter, some beekeepers will lose up to 75% of their hives. And hives only "reproduce" in summers when they're very strong. If this year is a bad one... they could literally not survive.

It sounded pretty ominous to me even before you chimed in. If agriculture was hurt badly from one year to the next by a sudden bee die-off, it could make concerns about Peak Oil and The Recession look pretty minor in comparison.

Thanks for the info.

It sounds like you have some understanding of the way these hives are run. Aren't commercial "hives" stored in boxes with vertically slotted plates that the hive grows on? During winter why not just move the hives into a heated room with plenty of bee-friendly nutrients?

I come at it from a non-commercial perspective; at most I've had two hives at a time. I was mostly speaking from personal experience of winter losses; it's really heartbreaking.

Commercial hives are indeed relatively mobile, as they're temporarily stored on trucks to move from field to field. It's possible that it's simply untenable to keep bees indoors on a large scale. Hives that are too close together for long periods of time will attack and raid each other. There simply might not be enclosed spaces large or affordable enough to hold wintering bees.

But someone who does commercial bee-keeping could probably give you a much better answer.

Original article on the story: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2001067

well the people who were saying it was the cell phone towers now look very stupid. I think there was even a pseudo-scientific "study" "proving without a doubt" that the cell phones were causing the problem. "They use it to sense the direction of the earth's magnetic field and their ability to do this is compromised by radiation from [cell] phones and their base stations. So basically bees do not find their way back to the hive."

Reply on news.ycombinator.com