Study shows glyphosate impairs learning in bumblebees
phys.org
phys.org
Honeybee Democracy - How honeybees make collective decisions―and what we can learn from this amazing democratic process
https://www.amazon.com/Honeybee-Democracy-Thomas-D-Seeley/dp...
From what I read, I can only imagine the traffic!
A) farmers use it as a crop dissicant in large quantities to make their crops cheaper to harvest, outside the spec of the product and
B) when it's used in unsuitable soil, temperature, and humidity conditions.
In the right conditions it has a half life of a few days and will be completely inert in a couple of weeks. This is a relatively small impact for a pretty big benefit. In poorly suited conditions it can persist for months or years.
We should just make it legal for use in situations where it decays quickly and harmlessly and disallow it's use in jurisdictions where the conditions are not appropriate for it's use. It's just a chemical, like any other chemical as long as it's used responsibly it can deliver incredible benefits. In this case cost-effectively feeding the world.
If the price for all that is some impairment to bumblebees for a few weeks maybe we should weigh that against the benefits and make a rational decision.
B - Sounds like it would need regulation? Who is making sure farmers are using it in this manner?
It isn't just bumblebee impairment. Entire colonies die. Bumblebees are needed to pollinate a large percentage of our food -> Hence not a "rational decision".
TO say nothing of impact on humans, and the half life in water runoff.
No, obviously not, because we enjoy living. You can't ignore those same tradeoffs when they happen to not be taking place in your back yard.
We can make sensible regulation to minimize our impact but sometimes we need to make an impact to extract resources, just how it is.
Eg. glyphosate might an option to regain control over weeds versus a systematic plow of the soil that has for consequences to damage its structure and its organisms.
As far as I can tell this is not accurate- glyphosate breaks down to AMPA which is not inert.
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221339842...
The paper you linked to is about pesticide is it not?
It's far more likely the bees are getting covered in chemicals when said chemicals are applied to the flowers of the plants which is often the case with fungicides. You're not going to spray glyphosate on your orchard trees because it would kill them. The fungicide powder used to coat seeds are is also a problem as it's dusty and gets airborne easily. Glyphosate might be a bit of a scapegoat when the other chemicals are far worse.
To try to answer my own question it seems that this page at least suggests that it is non-toxic:
https://www.ncagr.gov/pollinators/documents/Bee%20Pesticide%...
Also it looks like the red and maybe yellow sections of that list should get banned in favor of the green. If there's that many alternatives, we should really force people to switch.
> Most of studies of rodents analyzed in this review used doses of glyphosate or GBH that did not exceed the current NOAEL and ranged from 5 mg/kg [68] to 800 mg/kg [13]. These doses are not representative of human environmental exposures, which are in the range of μg/kg/day.
> the data discussed herein suggest that these values may still be too high. The results analyzed in this review suggest that the ability of glyphosate, alone or in formulation, to produce neurotoxic effects in rodents has been underestimated.