An Environmental Protection Agency memo written last November goes a long way toward solving the mystery of honey bee colony collapse disorder. It also provides a snapshot of the conflict between corporate interests and the natural world that’s one of the major conflicts of the time.
The memo makes clear that the EPA under the Bush administration put honey bees and the crops they pollinate at grave risk. The Obama administration has not reversed the earlier practice, so it bears responsibility as well.
The memo was written in response to a request by Bayer, makers of the neonicotinoid pesticide Clothianidin, to expand the use of Clothianidin to mustard seed and cotton. Clothianidin is an insecticide that is drawn through the vascular system of a plant and “expressed” in the plant’s nectar and pollen.
In 2003, though EPA scientists warned that the stuff was toxic to honey bees, Bayer was allowed to register Clothianidin on the condition that it do a study of its effects later; meanwhile the pesticide was approved for use on corn and canola, and in 2004 the dose of neonicotinoids in commercially sold corn seeds was hiked by 500 percent. Eventually a study of the effects of Clothianidin appeared; the EPA now says the study has “deficiencies.”
In November, EPA officials wrote: “Acute toxicity studies to honey bees show that clothianidin is highly toxic on both a contact and an oral basis. … An incident in Germany already illustrated the toxicity of clothianidin to honeybees when allowed to drift off-site from treated seed during planting. …The proposed application rates and uses [for mustard seed and cotton] also pose an acute and chronic risk to small birds and mammals when clothianidin-treated seeds are applied with low efficiency or no incorporation methods.”
No one is saying that honeybee dieoffs, including colony collapse disorder, have just one cause. But it’s also true that the disorder became more widespread in the U.S. and Europe at the same time neonicotinoid pesticide use increased.
By now, neonicotinoids have been banned or restricted in France, Italy and Germany. In Italy’s corn-growing areas, bee populations that had experienced colony collapse disorder bounced back swiftly after neonicotinoid pesticides were banned in 2009. To read the EPA memo, go to www.panna.org/sites/default/files/Memo_Nov2010_Clothianidin_0.pdf.
