Market Farming

[Leigh Hauter <bullrunfarm AT hughes.net>]

Title: USDA study linked imidacloprid & CCD 2 years ago

http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/nature/exclusive-bees-facing-a-poisoned-spring-2189267.html

This article in Britian's Independent reports that Dr.Pettis and team at the USDA's Beltsville Bee Research Laboratory completed a study two years ago which shows that even minute  quantities of the systemic neurotoxin imidacloprid makes honeybees susceptible to disease

"The American study, led by Dr Jeffrey Pettis, research leader at the US government bee lab in Beltsville, Maryland, has demonstrated that the insects' vulnerability to infection is increased by the presence of imidacloprid, even at the most microscopic doses. Dr Pettis and his team found that increased disease infection happened even when the levels of the insecticide were so tiny that they could not subsequently be detected in the bees, although the researchers knew that they had been dosed with it.

Dr Pettis told The Independent his research had now been put forward for publication. "[It] was completed almost two years ago but it has been too long in getting out," he said. "I have submitted my manuscript to a new journal but cannot give a publication date or share more of this with you at this time." makes honeybees susceptible to disease.

However, it is known about, because Dr Pettis and a member of his team, Dennis van Engelsdorp, of Penn State University - both leaders in research focusing on colony collapse disorder (CCD) - have spoken about it at some length in a film about bee deaths which has been shown widely in Europe, but not yet in Britain or the US - although it has been seen by The Independent.

In The Strange Disappearance of The Bees, made by the American film-maker Mark Daniels, Pettis and van Engelsdorp reveal that they exposed two groups of bees to the well-known bee disease nosema. One of the groups was also fed tiny doses of imidacloprid. There was a higher uptake of infection in the bees fed the insecticide, even though it could not subsequently be detected, which raises the possibility that such a phenomenon occurring in the wild might be simply undetectable.

Although the US study remains unpublished, it has been almost exactly replicated by French researchers at the National Institute for Agricultural Research in Avignon. They published their study in the journal Environmental Microbiology and said: "We demonstrated that the interaction between nosema and a neonicotinoid (imidacloprid) significantly weakened honeybees."