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Coca-Cola to World: Don’t Stop Swilling Sugary Drinks, Just Exercise!

Mother Jones

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Stunningly, one-third of American adults have a condition called metabolic syndrome, defined as “a cluster of major cardiovascular risk factors related to overweight/obesity and insulin resistance.” People with metabolic syndrome are twice as likely to develop heart disease as people without it, and five times as likely to develop full-blown type II diabetes. Meanwhile, a growing body of research links insulin resistance with Alzheimer’s and other forms of cognitive decline.

There’s a solid consensus that two things need to happen to reverse this budding calamity: People need to eat better—less hyper-processed, sugar-laden fare—and exercise more.

Now, if you were in the business of selling sweet beverages—ones that contain about 9 teaspoons of sugar per 12-ounce serving—you’d have an interest in suggesting that maybe diet’s not that big of an issue, after all. Instead of cutting down on soda, why not just take an extra walk around the block?

According to this New York Times exposé, Coca-Cola, the globe’s biggest purveyor of sugary drinks, invested $1.5 million last year to launch the Global Energy Balance Network, which, The Times reports, “promotes the argument that weight-conscious Americans are overly fixated on how much they eat and drink while not paying enough attention to exercise.”

The beverage maker has also invested “close to $4 million in funding for various projects spearheaded by two prominent US health academics who serve on GEBN’s executive committee, The Times adds. One of them, University of South Carolina health professor Steven Blair, is featured in the above video insisting that “most of the focus in the popular media and in the scientific press is, ‘Oh they’re eating too much, eating too much, eating too much’—blaming fast food, blaming sugary drinks, and so on for rising obesity rates… And there’s really virtually no compelling evidence that that, in fact, is the cause.”

Meanwhile, the World Health Organization recommends holding added sugar consumption to about 25 grams (six teaspoons) per day—meaning a single Coke (nine teaspoons of sugar) will take you 50 percent over its daily recommendation. My colleague Maddie Oatman has a great piece on just how easy it is to catapult over the 6 teaspoons limit in the sugar-happy US food environment.

Now, Coke’s high-dollar drumbeating about how sugary drinks don’t matter much may be nefarious, but it’s also sort of desperate. People are wising up—soda sales have fallen for ten straight years.

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Coca-Cola to World: Don’t Stop Swilling Sugary Drinks, Just Exercise!

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The Big-Ag-Fueled Algae Bloom That Won’t Leave Toledo’s Water Supply Alone

Mother Jones

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The citizens of Toledo, Ohio, have embarked upon their new summer ritual: stocking up on bottled water. For the second straight year, an enormous algae bloom has settled upon Lake Erie, generating nasty toxins right where the city of 400,000 draws its tap water.

It’s a kind of throwback to Toledo’s postwar heyday, when the Rust Belt’s booming factories deposited phosphorus-laced wastewater into streams that made their way into Lake Erie, feeding algae growths that rival today’s in size. But after the decline of heavy industry and the advent of the Clean Water Act, there’s a new main source of algae-feeding phosphorus into the beleaguered lake: fertilizer runoff from industrial-scale corn and soybean farms. (Background here.)

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The Big-Ag-Fueled Algae Bloom That Won’t Leave Toledo’s Water Supply Alone

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Watch What It’s Like to Live Amidst Industrial Hog Farms

Mother Jones

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As I showed recently, the United States is emerging as the world’s hog farm—the country where massive foreign meat companies like Brazil’s JBS and China’s WH Group (formerly Shuanghui) alight when they want to take advantage of rising global demand for pork. (If JBS’s recent deal to buy Cargill’s US hog operations goes through, JBS and WH Group together will slaughter 45 percent of hogs grown in the United States.)

A recent piece by Lily Kuo in Quartz (companion video above) documents what our status as the world’s source of cheap pork means for the people who live in industrial-hog country. It focuses on Duplin County in eastern North Carolina, which houses “about 530 hog operations with capacity for over 2 million pigs ….one of the highest concentrations of large, tightly-controlled indoor hog operations, also known as CAFOs (concentrated animal feeding operations) in the world.” In Duplin, “hogs outnumber humans almost 32 to 1,” Kuo reports. And that means living amid lots and lots of pig shit—the county’s hog facilities generate twice the annual waste of the entire population of New York City.

As I’ve shown before, the hog industry doesn’t build wealth in the communities where it operates—the opposite, in fact. “Almost a quarter of the population lives below the poverty line, making Duplin County one of the poorest counties in North Carolina,” Kuo writes. “It is also disproportionately black and Hispanic compared to the rest of the state.”

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Watch What It’s Like to Live Amidst Industrial Hog Farms

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California Drinking Water: Not Just Vanishing, But Also Widely Contaminated

Mother Jones

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In normal years, California residents get about 30 percent of their drinking water from underground aquifers. And in droughts like the current one—with sources like snowmelt from the Sierra Nevada mountains virtually non-existent—groundwater supplies two-thirds of our most populous state’s water needs. So it’s sobering news that about 20 percent of the groundwater that Californians rely on to keep their taps flowing carries high concentrations of contaminants like arsenic, uranium, and nitrate.

That’s the conclusion of a ten-year US Geological Survey study of 11,000 public-water wells across the state. The researchers tested the wells for a variety of contaminants, looking for levels above thresholds set by the Environmental Protection Agency and/or the California State Water Resources Board.

Interestingly, naturally occurring trace elements like arsenic, manganese, and uranium turned up at high levels much more commonly agriculture-related chemicals like nitrate.

In the ag-heavy San Joaquin Valley (the Central Valley’s Southern half), for example, you might expect plenty of nitrate in the water, because of heavy reliance on nitrogen fertilizers. Over the limit of 10 parts per million in water, nitrate can impede the blood’s ability to carry oxygen and has been linked to elevated rates of birth defects and cancers of the ovaries and thyroid. But while 4.9 percent of wells in the San Joaquin turned up over legal nitrate thresholds, arsenic (over legal limits in 11.2 percent of wells) and uranium (7.4 percent)—neither of which are used in farming—were more common.

But in the case of uranium—which heightens the risk of kidney trouble and cancer when consumed in water over long periods—agriculture isn’t off the hook. Kenneth Belitz, the study’s lead author and chief of the USGS’s National Water Quality Assessment Program, explains that before irrigation, the arid San Joaquin landscape supported very little vegetation, and the naturally occurring uranium in the landscape was relatively stable. But as farms sprouted up, irrigation water reacted with carbon dioxide from now-abundant plant roots to “mobilize” the uranium, pushing it downward at the rate of 5 to ten feet per year and eventually into the water table.

Conversely, some of the regions with highest nitrate levels are former ag areas that are now suburban, Belitz says: northern California’s Livermore Valley and southern California’s Santa Ana basin. That’s because nitrates, too, move through the soil strata at a rate of five to ten feet per year, and take years to accumulate in underground aquifers.

And that means that today’s ag-centric areas, including the San Joaquin Valley, could be slowly building up nitrate levels year by year that could lead to much higher nitrate levels in well water in coming decades, Belitz says.

For California residents and policymakers, the reports adds another distressing data point to the current water crisis. The fossil record and climate models suggests that precipitation levels will likely drop significantly compared to 20th century norms going forward, according to UC Berkeley paleoclimatologist B. Lynn Ingram—meaning an ever-growing reliance on groundwater for both farms and residents. Meanwhile, NASA research shows that this increasingly important resource is being drawn down at a much faster pace than it’s being replenished. And this latest USGS study suggests that the state’s precious, vanishing groundwater supply is widely contaminated. It’s enough to make you want to open a bottle of the state’s famous wine.

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California Drinking Water: Not Just Vanishing, But Also Widely Contaminated

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Egg Prices Soar 60 Percent as Avian Flu Slams Midwest

Mother Jones

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Retail egg prices have risen from an average of $1.22 per dozen in mid-May to $1.95 this week, the US Department of Agriculture reports. That’s a 60 percent jump in just a month—a reflection of the massive toll being exacted by an avian flu outbreak that has ripped through the Midwest’s egg-laying farms.

“Highly pathogenic” to birds, but so far not to people, the strain first turned up in Oregon in last December and has since rapidly moved east to Minnesota and Iowa. It has now killed or triggered the euthanasia of 47 million birds. I go into more detail on the outbreak here and here, and evolutionary biologist Rob Wallace of the Institute of Global Studies at the University of Minnesota gives his take here.

The flu’s spread is slowing as the weather warms up (flu viruses don’t thrive in the heat), but producers in the south, where the great bulk of US chicken is grown, fear an outbreak there this fall. Last week, North Carolina’s agriculture department announced the ban of poultry shows and public live bird sales, effective Aug. 15 to Jan. 15, “due to the threat of highly pathogenic avian influenza.”

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Egg Prices Soar 60 Percent as Avian Flu Slams Midwest

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Tom’s Kitchen: Steamed Spring Green Beans and New Potatoes with Parsley Sauce and Sardines

Mother Jones

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My vegetable repertoire has narrowed to the point of tedium: I sauté fast-cooking ones like greens and fresh beans and roast slow-cooking ones like potatoes unto caramelization. Most everything gets plenty of garlic, high-flavor fats like olive oil or lard, and a dash of chile pepper.

But on a recent trip to Austin’s urban-ag jewel Boggy Creek Farms, I picked up first-of-the-season green beans and red new potatoes that were so fresh and enticing that such treatments seemed way too aggressive. I wanted the flavor of the vegetables themselves, not my cooking techniques and condiments, to dominate.

So I did something I don’t think I’ve ever done voluntarily: I steamed them. And I’ll be damned if they didn’t avoid blandness, the fate I’ve always associated with the technique. Instead, the potatoes were like an impossibly potato-y bite of the earth itself; and the green beans delivered a crunchy jolt of chlorophyllic sweetness.

To bring it all together into a light meal, I needed a low-key dressing. My Boggy Creek expedition also netted a bunch of flat-leaf parsley, which I decided to whiz into a vinaigrette. I also wanted a protein element, and in my cupboard I found one that would provide a sharp contrast to the delicate vegetables: a tin of sardines.

To preserve the original idea—vegetables that tasted of themselves—I decided to compose the plate precisely. Here’s what I did:

Steamed Spring Green Beans and New Potatoes with Parsley Sauce and Sardines

(Light meal for two, plus some leftovers)

½ pound smallish, freshly dug (“new”) potatoes, quartered

½ pound fresh green beans, stem ends snapped off, snapped in half

1 bunch flat-leaf parsley

½ cup extra-virgin olive oil

2 tablespoons apple-cider vinegar

1 small clove of garlic, crushed and peeled

Sea salt

Freshly ground black pepper

1 4.25 oz can of sardines in olive oil (I used this kind)

Add a steamer insert to a pot along with an inch of water. Cover and turn heat to high until the water boils. Turn the heat down halfway, add the potatoes, cover, and steam until they’re just tender. Remove to a bowl. Add a bit more water to the pot, and repeat with the green beans, making sure they’re left with a little crunch.

Meanwhile, make the vinaigrette by combining the parsley, oil, vinegar, and a pinch of salt and pepper in a food processor or blender. Mix until reasonably smooth. (You will likely have leftover dressing—keeps well in the fridge for a few days, and makes everything taste good.)

To compose, start by dotting each plate with splotches of dressing. Now carefully layer on the vegetables, distributing them more or less evenly (leaving aside about a third for seconds or leftovers.) Then add the sardines the same way—use them all, because they don’t make for fun leftovers. Finally, add a few more dots of dressing, as well as a conservative dusting of sea salt and freshly ground black pepper. Place a bowl of extra dressing at the table for supplementation.

This dish is made to serve with a minerally, ice cold white wine.

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Tom’s Kitchen: Steamed Spring Green Beans and New Potatoes with Parsley Sauce and Sardines

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We’re Eating Less Meat—Yet Factory Farms Are Still Growing

Mother Jones

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The United States remains one of the globe’s most carnivorous nations, but things have changed subtly in recent decades. While our consumption of chicken has skyrocketed, we’re eating much less red meat.

Carolyn Perot

Overall per capita meat consumption has fallen nearly 10 percent since the 2007-‘8 financial meltdown; and as we cut back on quantity, we’re more likely to pay up for animals raised outside and not dosed with all manner of drugs.

Meanwhile, though, the meat industry lurches on, consolidating operations and stuffing its factory-scale facilities ever tighter with animals, as the organization Food and Water Watch shows in a recently updated map:

See the interactive version of this map here. Food and Water Watch

The charts below show the big picture. Note that the overall number of animals kept on US farms is leveling off, and in the case of beef cattle and meat chickens (broilers), actually dropping a bit. But the number of animals stuffed into each facility remains steadily on the rise for beef and dairy cows, hogs, and egg-laying hens. The number of meat chickens per site has plateaued—at the stunning level of more than 100,000 birds.

Among the many ecological problems you create when you concentrate so many animals in one place is massive loads of manure. How much?

These factory-farmed livestock produced 369 million tons of manure in 2012, about 13 times as much as the sewage produced by the entire U.S. population. This 13.8 billion cubic feet of manure is enough to fill the Dallas Cowboys stadium 133 times.

When humans live together in large numbers, as in cities, we’ve learned to treat our waste before sending it downstream. The meat industry faces no such requirement, and instead collects manure in large outdoor cesspools (known, picturesquely, as “lagoons”) before being spread on surrounding farmland. Some individual counties churn out much more waste than large metropolises. Here’s Food and Water Watch on the nation’s most dairy- and hog-centric counties:

Recycling manure as farm fertilizer is an ecologically sound idea in the abstract—but when animals are concentrated in such numbers, they produce much more waste than surrounding landscapes can healthily absorb. As a result, nutrients like nitrogen and phosphorus leach into streams and rivers, feeding algae blooms and fouling drinking water. Then there are bacterial nasties. “Six of the 150 pathogens found in animal manure are responsible for 90 percent of human food- and water-borne diseases: Campylobacter, Salmonella, Listeria, E. coli 0157:H7, Cryptosporidium and Giardia,” Food and Water Watch reports.

Air, too, is a problem, as anyone who’s ever gotten close to a teeming cow, pig, or chicken facility can testify. Thousands of people, of course, are forced to live near them or work on them, and it’s no picnic. “Overexposure to hydrogen sulfide a pungent gas emanating from lagoons can cause dizziness, nausea, headaches, respiratory failure, hypoxia and even death,” Food and Water Watch states. “Workers in factory farm facilities experience high levels of asthma-like symptoms, bronchitis and other respiratory diseases.”

And these counties tended to be bunched together in great manure-churning clusters. Note, for example, how most industrial-scale hog production takes place in the Midwest and in eastern North Carolina:

While Big Chicken has chosen to alight largely upon the southeast, the Mississippi Delta, and California’s Central Valley:

So why are these large facilities humming even as US eaters cut back? Globally, demand for meat continues to rise, and the dark-red spots on the maps above have emerged as key production nodes in an increasingly globalized meat market. US meat exports have tripled in value since 1997 (USDA numbers), and the industry wants more, as evidenced by its push to support the controversial Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal with Asia.

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We’re Eating Less Meat—Yet Factory Farms Are Still Growing

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Holy Shit! Almonds Require a Ton of Bees

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Growing 80 percent of the globe’s almonds in California doesn’t just require massive amounts of water. It also takes a whole bunch of honeybees for pollination—roughly two hives’ worth for every acre of almonds trees, around 1.7 million hives altogether. That’s at least 80 percent of all available commercial hives in the United States, Gene Brandi, a California beekeeper who serves as vice president of the American Beekeeping Federation, recently told NPR.

Now, that vast army of bees—made up, all told, of more than 80 billion flying, buzzing soldiers—doesn’t stay put in California’s almond-happy Central Valley all year. The almond bloom typically lasts for just a few weeks (or less) in February. The modern honeybee operation is an itinerant business—beekeepers move hives throughout the year, in pursuit of paid pollination gigs—from tangerines in Florida to cherries in Washington state—as well as good forage for honey.

But California’s almond bloom is the biggest gig of all—the “largest managed pollination event anywhere in the world,” Scientific American reports. And as US honeybee populations’ health has flagged in recent years—most famously epitomized by the mysterious winter die-offs that began around a decade ago, known as colony collapse disorder—the almond industry has been drawing in a larger and and larger portion of the nation’s available bee hives.

One question that arises is: Why do the nation’s beekeepers uproot themselves and their winged charges to travel to California each year? The state houses about 500,000 beehives, meaning that more then 1 million come in, from as far away as Maine. What’s the incentive?

These days, US beekeepers typically make more money from renting out their bees for pollination than they do from producing honey. “Without pollination income, we’d be out of business,” Brandi told me. Income from the two sources varies year to year, but pollination income has grown over the years even as honey revenues have fallen, depressed by competition from imported honey. In 2012, for example, US beekeepers brought in $283 million from honey, versus an estimated $656 million from pollination.

And California’s almond growers have to shell out big money to draw in their pollinators—between $165 and $200 per hive, vs $45 to $75 a hive a decade ago, according to the Fresno Bee. That’s around $309 million, if we assume as average price of $182 per hive, the midpoint of the Bee‘s range.

What’s the impact on overall honeybee health, which has been under heavy pressure over the past decade? There are two potential downsides.

The first is from pesticides—insect growth regulators and fungicides—bees encounter in their travels around almond groves. During the 2014 California almond bloom, between 15 percent and 25 percent of beehives suffered “severe” damage, ranging from complete hive collapse to dead and deformed brood (the next generation of bees incubating in the hive), the Pollinator Stewardship Council estimated. The die-off caused an uproar, and many beekeepers pointed a finger at pesticides—and they probably had a point, as I showed here.

This year, Brandi told me, some beekeepers reported losses, but they weren’t nearly as severe or widespread as the ones in 2014. In the wake of the 2014 troubles, the Almond Board of California released a set of “best management practices” for protecting honeybees during the bloom that, Brandi said, may have influenced growers to avoid particularly harmful pesticide applications. Given that almond growers utterly rely on—and indeed, pay heavily for—honeybees for pollinating their crop, it seems logical that they’ll avoid poisoning them when possible. There will also be tension, though, as long as almond trees are planted in geographically concentrated and vast groves. Large monocrops provide an ideal habitat for pests like fungi and insects, and thus a strong incentive to respond with chemicals. There’s also the possibility that concentrating such a huge portion of the nation’s bees in such a tight geographical area facilitates the spread of viruses and other pathogens.

The second threat to bee health from pollinating California’s massive almond bloom comes from long-distance travel. This one lies at the heart of the beekeeping industry’s itinerant business model. Does it compromise bee health to pack hundreds of hives onto a flatbed truck for cross-country trips? The stresses go well beyond the occasional truck wreck. Scientific American explains the rigors of apiary highway travel like this:

The migration…continually boomerangs honeybees between times of plenty and borderline starvation. Once a particular bloom is over, the bees have nothing to eat, because there is only that one pollen-depleted crop as far as the eye can see. When on the road, bees cannot forage or defecate. And the sugar syrup and pollen patties beekeepers offer as compensation are not nearly as nutritious as pollen and nectar from wild plants. Scientists have a good understanding of the macronutrients in pollen such as protein, fat and carbohydrate, but know very little about its many micronutrients such as vitamins, metals and minerals—so replicating pollen is difficult.

A 2012 paper, coauthored by USDA bee researcher Jeff Pettis, found that long-distance travel may indeed have ill health effects—the researchers found that “bees experiencing transportation have trouble fully developing their food glands and this might affect their ability to nurse the next generation of workers.”

Brandi, for his part, dismisses travel as a factor in the overall decline in bee health. “Bees have been traveling back and forth across he country for years,” he said—since long before the colony collapse disorder and other health troubles began to emerge a decade ago, he said. He said bee travel has actually gotten less stressful over the years as beekeepers have upgraded to smoother-riding flatbed trucks. He said other factors, including pesticides, declining biodiversity, and mites (a bee pest) are likely more important drivers of declining bee health.

Meanwhile, California almond country’s massive appetite for pollination isn’t likely to dissipate anytime soon. According to the latest USDA numbers, acreage devoted to almonds expanded by 5 percent in 2014, and growers continue laying in yet more groves this year, Western Farm Press reports. Land devoted to almonds has grown 50 percent since 2005—and every time farmers add another acre of trees, they need access to two additional bee hives for pollination.

So why don’t more beekeepers simply move to California and stay put, to take advantage of the world’s biggest—and growing—pollination gig? I put that question to longtime bee expert Eric Mussen of the University of California-Davis. He said the state is already home to 500,000 of the nation’s 2.7 million hives. The almond bloom is great for a few weeks, but in terms of year-round foraging, “California is already at or near its carrying capacity for honeybees,” he said—the areas with the best-quality forage are already well stocked with bees.So satisfying the world’s ever-growing appetite for almonds will continue to require an annual armada of beehive-laden trucks.

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Holy Shit! Almonds Require a Ton of Bees

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Bee Die-Offs Are Worst Where Pesticide Use Is Heaviest

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The nation’s honeybee crisis has deepened, with colony die-offs rising sharply over last year’s levels, the latest survey from the US Department of Agriculture-funded Bee Informed Partnership shows. A decade or so ago, a mysterious winter-season phenomenon known as colony-collapse disorder emerged, in which bee populations would abandon their hives en masse. These heavy winter-season losses have tapered off somewhat, but now researchers are finding substantial summer-season losses, too. Here are the latest numbers.

Chart: Bee Informed Partnership/University of Maryland/Loretta Kuo

Note that total losses are more than double what beekeepers report as the “acceptable rate”—that is, the normal level of hive attrition. Losses above the acceptable level put beekeepers in a precarious economic position and suggest that something is awry with bee health. “We traditionally thought of winter losses as a more important indicator of health, because surviving the cold winter months is a crucial test for any bee colony,” Dennis vanEngelsdorp, University of Maryland entomologist and director for the Bee Informed Partnership said in a press release. But now his team is also seeing massive summer die-offs. “Years ago, this was unheard of,” he added.

And here’s a map a map depicting where losses are heaviest:

Chart: Bee Informed Partnership/University of Maryland/Loretta Kuo

The survey report doesn’t delve into why the nation’s bees are under such severe strain, noting only, as USDA entomologist and survey co-coordinator Jeffrey Pettis put it, “the need to find better answers to the host of stresses that lead to both winter and summer colony losses.”

A growing weight of science implicated pesticides—particularly a ubiquitous class of insecticides called neonicitinoids, as well as certain fungicides—as likely factors.

Here are US Geological Survey maps of where two major neonics, imidacloprid and clothianidin, are grown. Note, too, the rapid rise in their use over the past decade.

Chart: USGS

Chart: USGS

A 2013 paper co-authored by the USDA’s Pettis and the University of Maryland’s vanEngelsdorp found that lows levels of two particular fungicides, chlorothalonil and pyraclostrobin, “had a pronounced effect” on bees’ ability to withstand a common pathogen. Here are the USGS’s maps for them.

Chart: USGS

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Bee Die-Offs Are Worst Where Pesticide Use Is Heaviest

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Bees Love Nicotine, Even Though It’s Killing Them

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If a ubiquitous class of pesticides called neonicotinoids harms bees and other pollinators—as many scientists think they do—why don’t those buzzing insects just avoid pollen and nectar that contains them?

That’s the question posed by a new study published in Nature by a team of UK researchers. Champions of these chemicals, the authors note, often argue that bees can simply choose not to forage on neonic-laced plants—an entomological twist, I guess, on the personal-responsibility creed often employed by the food industry to defer blame for the harmful effects of junk food.

What the research team found is remarkable: Far from avoiding neonics, foraging honeybees and bumblebees tend to prefer food laced with it—even though it causes them harm. To test how pollinators react to traces of neonics, the team created controlled environments over 24 hours for both bumblebees and honeybees and gave them two food choices: a straight sugar solution or a sugar solution laced with neonics at levels found in farm-field nectar.

According to the researchers, bees make food choices based on “gustatory neurons in hair-like sensilla” in their mouths. Potential food that’s toxic and/or non-nourishing normally triggers spikes in “bitter”-sensing neurons, alerting the bee to stop eating and move on top something else. The neonic-laced sugar water didn’t generate that reaction for either the bumblebees or honey bees, and so they consumed it freely—and tended to take in more of it than the neonic-free solution.

Why the preference? Here’s how Geraldine Wright, the study’s lead author and a professor at the Institute of Neuroscience at Newcastle University, put it in the press release accompanying the study (ScienceDaily): “Neonicotinoids target the same mechanisms in the bee brain that are affected by nicotine in the human brain.” In other words, while neonics don’t register as toxins, the do give bees the same buzz (so to speak) that people get from a cigarette. Thus the poisons “may act like a drug to make foods containing these substances more rewarding,” Wright added. (Neonics are synthetic versions of of nicotine, and thus chemically similar.

And just as human smokers court all manner of health trouble, the neonic-loving creatures of the study ate less than control groups that didn’t have access to the fun stuff. Cutting calories may sound great for a 21st century American, but it’s not good for beehives relying on well-fed foragers.

Because bees evidently seek out neonics, the authors argue, strategies to limit their exposure by planting pesticide-free nectar and pollen sources along roadsides and whatnot—a key element of President Obama’s “Federal Strategy to Promote the Health of Honey Bees and Other Pollinators”—might not by enough. “Instead,” they write, “long-term changes to policy that include reducing their use may be the only certain means of halting pollinator population decline.”

Another recent Nature study, this one by Swedish researchers, provides yet more reason for concern. The team tracked how wild bee populations and honeybee hives fared in 16 fields planted with rapeseed (canola)—half of which had been sewn with neonic-treated seeds, half of which hadn’t. The result: Populations of two kinds of wild bees—bumblebees and the solitary bees—dropped in the treated fields compared to the control ones. They found greatly diminished reproductive success in solitary bees in the treated fields. And bumblebee hives in treated fields showed slower growth and produced fewer queens than their control counterparts—both signs of diminished health.

As for honeybees, the insecticide seed treatment “had no significant influence on honeybee colony strength,” the authors report. That finding is consistent with previous studies suggesting that “honeybees are better at detoxifying after neonicotinoid exposure compared to bumblebees,” they write. But they note that their research took place over a short time—several weeks in summer when canola plants flower—and the “lack of short-term effects does not preclude the existence of long-term effects” on honeybees. And their conclusion is hardly comforting: Neonics “pose a substantial risk to wild bees in agricultural landscapes, and the contribution of pesticides to the global decline of wild bees may have been underestimated.”

Responding to similar research, the European Commission placed a moratorium on most neonic use back in 2013. But here in the United States, the chemicals remain ubiquitous. This spring, US farmers will likely plant 174 million acres of corn and soybeans—a combined swath of land about equal to the state of Texas. The majority of it will likely be with seeds that have been treated with neonics, which are then taken up by the crops and present in plant tissue, nectar, and pollen, ready to poison any creatures that munch (except humans—neonics aren’t considered toxic to us).

As the chart below chart—taken from a recent paper by Penn State entomologists Margaret Douglas and John Tooker—shows, US neonic use has exploded since treated seeds first hit the market in 1994. That may mean lots of pleasant neural sensations for bees, if the UK study has it right; but it should make any species that depends on pollination for sustenance—like us—think twice.

From: Previous Article Next Article From: “Large-Scale Deployment of Seed Treatments Has Driven Rapid Increase in Use of Neonicotinoid Insecticides and Preemptive Pest Management in U.S. Field Crops,” Douglas and Tooker, Environmental Science & Technology.”

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