Tag Archives: reporting

Bees face yet another lethal threat in dicamba, a drift-prone pesticide

Subscribe to The Beacon

This story was originally published by Reveal and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. The article was produced in collaboration with the Food & Environment Reporting Network, an independent nonprofit news organization.

While soybean farmers watched the drift-prone weed killer dicamba ravage millions of acres of crops over the last two years, Arkansas beekeeper Richard Coy noticed a parallel disaster unfolding among the weeds near those fields.

When Coy spotted the withering weeds, he realized why hives that produced 100 pounds of honey three summers ago now were managing barely half that: Dicamba probably had destroyed his bees’ food.

In October, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency extended its approval of the weed killer for use on genetically modified soybeans and cotton, mostly in the South and Midwest, for two more years. At the time, the EPA said: “We expect there will be no adverse impacts to bees or other pollinators.”

But scientists warned the EPA years ago that dicamba would drift off fields and kill weeds that are vital to honeybees. The consequences of the EPA’s decisions now are rippling through the food system.

Dicamba already has destroyed millions of dollars’ worth of non-genetically modified soybeans and specialty crops, such as tomatoes and wine grapes. And now it appears to be a major factor in large financial losses for beekeepers. Hive losses don’t affect just the nation’s honey supply: Honeybees pollinate more than $15 billion worth of fruits, nuts, and vegetables a year, largely in California, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

“It seems like everybody’s been affected,” said Bret Adee, whose family runs the nation’s largest beekeeping outfit, in South Dakota. He thinks 2018 might be “the smallest crop in the history of the United States for honey production.”

From 2016 to 2017, U.S. honey production dropped 9 percent. Official statistics for 2018 have not been released.

Beekeepers long have struggled to protect their hives from parasites, viruses, insecticides, and other colony-destroying threats. All these factors, as well as climate change, have been linked to colony collapse disorder, which emerged more than a decade ago and destroyed 30 to 90 percent of some beekeepers’ hives. Now with dicamba, beekeepers must contend with a scourge that can wipe out the food and habitat bees need to thrive.

Nine years ago, agricultural ecologist David Mortensen had told EPA officials that allowing dicamba use on genetically modified crops would pose serious risks to wild plants and the pollinators they sustain. In 2011, the EPA’s own scientists cited Mortensen’s work to conclude that increased use of dicamba could affect pollinators.

But the agency registered dicamba in 2016 despite the warnings, Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting and the Food & Environment Reporting Network reported in November. Last fall, the agency extended approval through 2020.

EPA officials declined to comment, citing the government shutdown.

‘Pretty damning’ evidence

No one factor can explain what’s driving hive losses. But the evidence is “pretty damning” that dicamba affects both pollinator forage and the bees themselves, said Mortensen, chair of University of New Hampshire’s Department of Agriculture, Nutrition, and Food Systems.

Dicamba damaged nearly 5 million acres of soybeans in the Midwest over the past two years, and “you know that all the field edges anywhere near the damaged crops were hammered by the herbicide,” Mortensen said, “which would mean the broadleaf plants the bees go to were hammered.” Dicamba has little effect on grasses, including corn and wheat, but even tiny doses can injure soybeans, wildflowers, and other broadleaf plants.

Dicamba was a hot topic at the annual American Honey Producers Association meeting earlier this month, said Darren Cox, a Utah beekeeper who stepped down as head of the association last year.

“We’re very concerned about dicamba and the impacts it’s having on the honey industry and the health of bees,” Cox said.

This year’s honey crop was “very poor” in several regions, he said. Drought in several top honey-producing states not only depleted bees’ forage, but also led to more herbicide use because stressed plants don’t easily absorb the chemicals. As a result, Cox said, “you tend to have weaker hive strength because of lack of forage and nutrition.”

South Dakota, where Adee Honey Farms is based, reported about 250,000 acres of dicamba-injured soybeans since 2017. The Adees typically manage 80,000 to 90,000 hives, “but our numbers have been so destroyed the last couple of years, we’ve started using other people’s bees,” Adee said.

More than 70 percent of the nation’s commercial honeybees are shipped to pollinate California’s million acres of almond orchards every winter. But this season, beekeepers have been struggling to fill their trucks with hives and are facing massive cuts to what is typically their biggest paycheck of the year.

Lyle Johnston, president of the Colorado Professional Beekeeping Association, typically sends almond farmers 75,000 hives, including about 7,000 of his own. Johnston hasn’t had trouble with his bees, which he raises far from agricultural fields. (Colorado is among 34 states where it’s legal to spray dicamba on genetically modified crops, though few acres are planted with soybeans.) But in three decades of running bees to California, he says he’s never had so many beekeepers tell him they’ve come up short. Coy and several other beekeepers who typically send him as many as 10 truckloads of bees are sending half that this season.

California almond orchard.Barbara Rich / Getty Images

“It’s going to be a train wreck come the 5th of February, when the bloom starts,” Johnston said.

Many beekeepers near soybean fields said they are losing half their hives — losses similar to those attributed to colony collapse disorder.

Always free, always fresh.

Ask your climate scientist if Grist is right for you. See our privacy policy

“We can’t breed bees fast enough to keep up with the losses and maintain healthy colonies,” Adee said.

Gary Mackrill of North Dakota’s Mackrill Honey Farms thinks dicamba sprayed near his hives might be making bees more vulnerable to pathogens, cold, and other stressors. Mackrill lost nearly 40 percent of his hives last fall. The year before was even worse, he said.

“Our bee outfit has been devastated,” he said.

Over the last two years, when hundreds of thousands of acres of North Dakota soybeans were damaged by dicamba, Mackrill lost some 3,000 hives and more than a quarter-million dollars in pollination contracts. Last year, North Dakota banned dicamba applications after June 30, but it was too late.

By early July, “the honey flow just turned off like you turned off a faucet,” Mackrill said. “And it never resumed.”

Then after a cold snap hit North Dakota in the fall, Mackrill’s bees started freezing to death. Even when the mercury dips below zero, you might see a couple of dead bees, he said, “but handfuls of dead bees? That’s abnormal.”

Whether dicamba is affecting bees’ ability to stay warm is unclear. Mackrill hopes to find out by sending samples of dead bees to Strong Microbials, run by microbiologist Slava Strogolov in Milwaukee. Strogolov will test for dicamba and other pesticides in the bees’ guts.

Strogolov thinks dicamba might be harming gut microbes critical for bee health.

“Whenever honeybees land on the flower that’s been sprayed, they will ingest that pollen and the gut microbes will be the first ones exposed to these chemicals,” he said.

Honeybees rely on gut bacteria to digest pollen. If they don’t get enough pollen, they can’t make the fat they need to handle the cold.

Losing wild pollen sources

Coy became convinced that plummeting honey production at Coy’s Honey Farm, which is Arkansas’ largest beekeeping operation, was due to dicamba after reading one of Mortensen’s studies. The research showed that doses of dicamba that mimicked the drift associated with spraying the weed killer delayed flowering and reduced by half the number of flowers that plants produced and the number of pollinator visits.

Coy first saw dicamba symptoms on a major bee food called redvine, a flowering plant that snakes through tree canopies along fence rows. In 2017, the vine’s shiny teardrop leaves looked warped and wilted. By last summer, he said, the vines were dead.

Bees depend on redvine for nectar and pollen, the protein source that helps hives survive freezing temperatures, parasites, and other stressors. If queens lack pollen, they won’t lay eggs and the population stagnates or declines.

When Coy inspected hives closer to Mississippi, at sites where farmers didn’t use dicamba, he found redvine bursting with seed pods and flowers. Nearby hives hummed with bees that produced a hundred pounds of honey and five to six frames of stored pollen.

But the majority of hives in Arkansas, where the Coys kept most of their 13,000 hives, were too anemic to ship to California almond growers. Last year, Coy said, “turned out to be a disaster for us.”

In years past, some commercial beekeepers tried moving their hives into Arkansas’ hill country to get away from pesticides, said Jon Zawislak, a University of Arkansas extension entomologist and apiary expert. But seasonal drought in July and August leaves wildflowers in the hills without much nectar and beehives without much honey. Historically, hives did better around agriculture, he said, because irrigated fields kept flowers blooming, and beekeepers would shift the bees around to avoid pesticides.

But moving hives doesn’t work with a weed killer like dicamba that can evaporate for days after spraying.

“The situation with dicamba is brand new,” Zawislak said. Beekeepers are trying to adapt, he added, “but they can’t maintain hundreds or thousands of colonies in areas that simply don’t produce anything.”

And although agricultural fields help bees weather drought, Zawislak’s recent research shows that bees get the lion’s share of their pollen from wild vegetation.

On New Year’s Day, after losing more than a million dollars’ worth of honey and pollination contracts over the past two years, the Coys closed Crooked Creek Bee Co., their retail honey business, and made plans to relocate to Mississippi.

“We can only produce about 50 percent of the honey that we’ve produced prior to in-crop use of dicamba,” Coy said. “We have no choice but to leave Arkansas.”

Follow this link: 

Bees face yet another lethal threat in dicamba, a drift-prone pesticide

Posted in Accent, alo, Anchor, Casio, FF, G & F, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Oster, Radius, Uncategorized, Wiley | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Bees face yet another lethal threat in dicamba, a drift-prone pesticide

US Customs Agents Just Gave Airlines the Green Light to Ignore Trump’s "Muslim Ban"

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

(Reuters) – U.S. Customs & Border Protection has informed U.S. airlines that they can once again board travelers who had been barred by an executive order last week, after it was blocked nationwide on Friday by a federal judge in Seattle, an airline official told Reuters.

In a conference call at around 9 p.m. EST (0200 GMT), the U.S. agency told airlines to operate just as they had before the order, which temporarily had stopped refugees and nationals from seven Muslim-majority countries from entering the United States. Individuals from those states who have proper visas can now board U.S.-bound flights, and airlines are working to update their websites to reflect the change, said the official, who was not authorized to speak publicly.

(Reporting By Jeffrey Dastin in San Francisco; Editing by Sandra Maler)

Credit:  

US Customs Agents Just Gave Airlines the Green Light to Ignore Trump’s "Muslim Ban"

Posted in FF, GE, Green Light, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on US Customs Agents Just Gave Airlines the Green Light to Ignore Trump’s "Muslim Ban"

This Is What Would Happen If the Rest of the World Ate the Way America Does

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

This story was originally published by Reveal from the Center for Investigative Reporting and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Subscribe to the podcast and learn more at revealnews.org.

If the rest of the world ate like Americans, the planet would have run out of fresh water 15 years ago, according to the world’s largest food company.

In private, Nestle executives told US officials that the world is on a collision course with doom because Americans eat too much meat, and now, other countries are following suit, according to a secret US report titled “Tour D’Horizon with Nestle: Forget the Global Financial Crisis, the World Is Running Out of Fresh Water.”

Producing a pound of meat requires a tremendous amount of water because farmers use tons of crops such as corn and soy to feed each animal, which require tens of thousands of gallons of water to grow. It is far more efficient when people eat the corn or soy directly.

The planet is a on a “potentially catastrophic” course as billions of people in countries such as India and China begin eating more beef, chicken and pork like their counterparts in Western countries, according to the 2009 report released by WikiLeaks and first reported by Reveal at The Center for Investigative Reporting in a cache of water-related classified documents. The Chinese now eat about half as much meat as Americans, Australians and Europeans, a figure that continues to rapidly rise as more Chinese are lifted out of poverty and into the middle class.

And Nestle—which makes Gerber baby food, Nescafe, Hot Pockets, DiGiorno pizza, Lean Cuisine, Stouffer’s, Nestea, Dreyer’s and Haagen-Dazs ice cream—is deeply concerned.

Here are some of the takeaways, with key quotes from the secret report:

Global water shortages are just around the corner.

“Nestle thinks one-third of the world’s population will be affected by fresh water scarcity by 2025, with the situation only becoming more dire thereafter and potentially catastrophic by 2050.”

Major regions, including in the United States, are being drained of their underground aquifers.

“Problems with be severest in the Middle East, northern India, northern China, and the western United States.”

Excessive meat-eating is driving water depletion.

“Nestle starts by pointing out that a calorie of meat requires 10 times as much water to produce as a calorie of food crops. As the world’s growing middle classes eat more meat, the earth’s water resources will be dangerously squeezed.”

There’s plenty of water to feed everyone a diet that’s not so meatcentric.

“Nestle reckons that the earth’s maximum sustainable freshwater withdrawals are about 12,500 cubic kilometers per year. In 2008, global freshwater withdrawals reached 6,000 cubic kilometers, or almost half of the potentially available supply. This was sufficient to provide an average 2500 calories per day to the world’s 6.7 billion people, with little per capita meat consumption.”

The American diet is eating the world dry.

“The current US diet provides about 3600 calories per day with substantial meat consumption. If the whole world were to move to this standard, global fresh water resources would be exhausted at a population level of 6 billion, which the world reached in the year 2000.”

This is an even bigger problem now that other countries are eating like America and the global population’s set to grow by 2 billion by 2050.

“There is not nearly enough fresh water available to provide this standard to a global population expected to exceed 9 billion by mid-century.”

So what’s Nestle’s prediction for the future? Think “Mad Max”…

“It is clear that current developed country meat-based diets and patterns of water usage do not provide a blueprint for the planet’s future. Based on present trends, Nestle believes that the world will face a cereals shortfall of as much as 30 percent by 2025. (Nestle) stated it will take a combination of strategies to avert a crisis.”

Why is this the first time you’re hearing this from the world’s largest food company?

“Sensitive to its public image, Nestle has maintained a low profile in discussing solutions and tries not to preach…the firm scrupulously avoids confrontation and polemics, preferring to influence its audience discretely by example.”

Read More: 

This Is What Would Happen If the Rest of the World Ate the Way America Does

Posted in alo, Anchor, Everyone, FF, GE, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on This Is What Would Happen If the Rest of the World Ate the Way America Does

Florida officials banned from talking about climate change

The Issue That Must Not Be Named

Florida officials banned from talking about climate change

By on 9 Mar 2015 11:10 amcommentsShare

Florida Gov. Rick Scott’s (R) administration has apparently instituted a ban on using the term “climate change” when making policy. Tristram Korten reports for the Florida Center for Investigative Reporting that state Department of Environmental Protection employees “have been ordered not to use the term ‘climate change’ or ‘global warming’ in any official communications, emails, or reports.”

This unwritten policy went into effect after Gov. Rick Scott took office in 2011 and appointed Herschel Vinyard Jr. as the DEP’s director, according to former DEP employees. Gov. Scott, who won a second term in November, has repeatedly said he is not convinced that climate change is caused by human activity, despite scientific evidence to the contrary. …

But four former DEP employees from offices around the state say the order was well known and distributed verbally statewide.

One former DEP employee who worked in Tallahassee during Scott’s first term in office, and asked not to be identified because of an ongoing business relationship with the department, said staffers were warned that using the terms in reports would bring unwanted attention to their projects.

“We were dealing with the effects and economic impact of climate change, and yet we can’t reference it,” the former employee said.

Even the term “sea-level rise” — referring to an issue that will hit Florida particularly hard in coming years — was banned for a time, according to former state employees who spoke with Korten. “Sea-level rise was to be referred to as ‘nuisance flooding,’” one former DEP employee told Korten, describing a meeting she had with a supervisor in 2014.

This kind of thing is not just happening in Florida. North Carolina, another state that will be hard-hit by rising seas, has banned some state employees from considering sea-level science. Specifically, as of 2012, the state is not allowed to account for new scientific predictions about sea-level rise when making policies that affect coastal communities. Instead, policymakers must stick to more moderate “historical data,” and ignore a 2011 report by the state’s Coastal Resources Commission that predicts 39 inches of sea-level rise by the end of the century. (This policy from the GOP legislature was in part a concession to real-estate industry lobbyists who feared, reasonably, that if prospective buyers knew beachfront homes would end up being swallowed by the ocean, they would probably avoid buying them.)

In fact, across America, lower-level officials have found that the most expedient way of making policy to address climate change is to not admit that the policy is designed to address climate change. Instead, when planning for higher temperatures, higher seas, and stronger storms, they use euphemisms — “sustainability” or “resilience” — to prepare for the Issue That Must Not Be Named. Unfortunately, in Florida, even the word “sustainability” is off-limits, according to one former DEP employee.

This ridiculous situation, and Scott’s policy, would be funny were the stakes for Americans not so high. People are continuing to move to low-lying areas of Florida, even as the scientific community continues to toss out dire predictions about the surging seas they will face as climate change moves forward. With state officials muzzled by order of the governor, Floridians are not likely to see any policy that realistically deals with the threat anytime soon.

Source:
In Florida, Officials Ban Term ‘Climate Change’

, Florida Center for Investigative Reporting.

Share

Please

enable JavaScript

to view the comments.

Get stories like this in your inbox

AdvertisementAdvertisement

Originally from:

Florida officials banned from talking about climate change

Posted in Anchor, FF, G & F, GE, Keurig, LG, ONA, Radius, Safer, solar, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Florida officials banned from talking about climate change