In September 2009, over 3,000 bee enthusiasts from around the world descended on the city of Montpellier in southern France for Apimondia — a festive beekeeper conference filled with scientific lectures, hobbyist demonstrations, and commercial beekeepers hawking honey. But that year, a cloud loomed over the event: bee colonies across the globe were collapsing, and billions of bees were dying.
Bee declines have been observed throughout recorded history, but the sudden, persistent and abnormally high annual hive losses had gotten so bad that the U.S. Department of Agriculture had commissioned two of the world’s most well-known entomologists — Dennis vanEngelsdorp, a chief apiary inspector in Pennsylvania, then studying at Penn State University, and Jeffrey Pettis, then working as a government scientist — to study the mysterious decline. They posited that there must be an underlying factor weakening bees’ immune systems.
At Le Corum, a conference center and opera house, the pair discussed their findings. They had fed bees with extremely small amounts of neonicotinoids, or neonics, the most commonly used class of insecticides in the world. Neonics are, […]
“start buying only organically grown produce” I am not a fan of synthetic chemicals in agriculture and I do often buy “organic” when the item is one that tends to be heavily treated. I would, however, point out that “organic” doesn’t mean chemical free. Under the rules that govern what can be labeled as organic, one can use all the “natural” sourced pesticide as one wishes. Permissible pesticides use poisons derived from natural sources and some of the most potent poisons in the world have natural sources. So when one buys organic one is still getting produce contaminated with chemical poisons. They just aren’t derived from synthetics. This is a lessor of two evils situation. The surest way of knowing you have chemical free produce is to grow your own or identify an individual who grows produce without the use of any chemical poisons (natural or synthetic) and buy from that person.