By HoneyColony Staff
Perhaps the latest study from Harvard will finally sound the gong on systemic pesticides: Neonicotinoids are proven to kill honeybees.
Dr. Chensheng (Alex) Lu, associate professor of Environmental Exposure Biology at the Harvard School of Public Health, issued his compelling research May 8 in the Bulletin of Insectology. He identifies the culprit of Colony Collapse Disorder as neonicotinoids, a lethal class of neuro-active insecticides that contain chemical similarities to nicotine.
How Neonicotinoids are Killing Bees — And Us!
While making our food toxic and burdening our bodies with an even greater chemical overload, neonicotinoids also batter the honeybee immune system. The bees fly off and vanish without a trace.
Banned in Europe, neonicotinoids are plentifully used in the United States. According to Lu’s report, “Bees from six of the 12 neonicotinoid-treated colonies had abandoned their hives, and were eventually dead with symptoms resembling CCD. However, we observed a complete opposite phenomenon in the control colonies, in which instead of abandonment, they were re-populated quickly with new emerging bees. Only one of the six control colonies was lost due to Nosema-like infection. The observations from this study may help to elucidate the mechanisms by which sub-lethal neonicotinoid exposure caused honeybees to vanish from their hives.”
Read more about neonicotinoids on HoneyColony.
