by Graham White
This spring, American farmers will plant 92 million acres of corn-the largest acreage since 1944,
almost all of it treated with the neonicotinoid pesticide Clothianidin; they will use this pesticide, despite
the fact that the EPA has never fully tested and licensed this product according to the law set down by
Congress.
Why are the neonicotinoids sc revolutionary? First-off,”neonics” are systemic, they are inside
plants. They are not sprayed onto the outside but are present inside the plant, in: sap, leaves, pollen,
nectar and fruit” Washing or peeling your fruit will not get rid of these pesticides-they are part of your
food, and part of the bees’ food too. The ‘old pesticides’ like DDT were only a danger to bees for a few
days; but neonics remain active inside the plant for the entire growing season.
Secondly, ‘neonics’ are fantastic ally poisonous: lmidacloprid, another famous neonic, is 6000
times more toxic than DDT, and Clothiankdin is even more lethal than that. Just three to five parts per
billion of Clothianidin in solution will kill any bee. What does that mean? lf you dissolved one dessertspoon
of Clothianidin in a thousand tons of water-an average swimming pool volume-that dilution-five
parts per billion would kill any bee” But, that is only the acute dose-which kills on contact. French
research by Bonmatin revealed that the ‘chronic dose, which impairs complex behaviors but does not
kill outright, is less than one fiftieth of the acute dose; around 0.1 parts per billion. These are such
minute amounts of poison that even sophisticated government labs cannot detect this level of
contamination.
Finally nicotinoids are nerve toxins. They block nerve receptors in the brains of bees and other
insects so nerve-signals cannot travel, Bees poisoned by nicotinoids look like they have Parkinson’s
disease. They shake and tremble; they lose control of complex behaviors like coordinated flight,
navigation and the waggle-dance. Mating-flights become impossible; poisoned foragers do not find
their way home.
These revolutionary poisons are also highly persistent in the soil and water of the fields where
they are used: lmadacloprid has a ‘half-life’of up to two years in soil while Clothianidin’s half-life is
much longer; even after 19 years, half of the Clothianidin that first went into the soil is still present to be
taken up by new crops.
Neonics dissolve readily in water, so these insecticides can travel a long way from the field
where they were first used, to be absorbed again and again by wildflowers on field margins or streambanks.
Thus, the nectar and pollen of wildflowers can also become lethal to bees, butterflies,
bumblebees and other insects.
As Tom Theobald wrote in an earlier article, the EPA registered Clothianidin in 2003, granting it a
‘conditional’ license despite the warnings of their own scientists:
“Clothianidin has the potential for toxic chronic exposure to honey bees, as well as other nontarget
pollinators, through Clothianidin residues in nectar and pollen..ln honey bees, the effects of this
toxic chronic exposure may include lethal and/or sub-lethal effects in the larvae and reproductive
effects in the queen.”
James Frazier, Professor of Entomology at Penn State, wrote: ” Among the neonicotinoids,
Clathianidin is among those most toxic for honey bees…our research indicates that systemic pesticides
occur in pollen and nectar in much greater quantities than previously thought, and that interactions
among pesticides occurs often and should be of wide concern.”
Bayer promised to carry out an additional “lifetime, or chronic exposure study” in 2003- but only
submitted this after four growing seasons in 2007. Now, I am not a professional researcher, but in the
immortal words of Raymond Chandler, “l can spot a tarantula on a slice of Angel food cake when I see
one”, see if you can spot the deliberate mistake here. Bayer went up to Canada and placed just four
beehives in a two and a half acre plot of canola, treated with Clothianidin, surrounded by a vast prairie
of untreated wild flowers. Now-the foraging radius of a bee colony is- conservatively-about 1.5 miles,
this makes for about 3,000 acres. so, in comparison to 3,000 acres of pesticide-laced canola,
represents about 0.0008 of the total area-less than a 15th of one percent.
Not surprisingly, the bees showed few signs of contamination by Ctothianidin, because they
were spending very little time on the pesticide-treated canola. Would you design an experiment like
that? More to the point, if you were the professional policy makers of the EPA” would you ever
conceivably accept such a study as valid science?
Well, the EPA’s own scientists didn’t accept this study and threw it out the window, but the
policy managers brought it back inside, dusted it off and said: “thafs just dandy, we’ll grant this
pesticide a full registration!”. As they say in the movies: “you couldn’t make it up”! lf any beekeeper
colluded in such an obvious scarn, he would be heartily ashamed, but from this evidence, I doubt the
EPA management would be embarrassed if they were caught drink as skunks, dancing bare-ass naked in
front of the Lincoln Memorial, swinging a chicken around their heads and whistling Dixie. These people
see themselves as “untouchable”.
ln 1972, Congress charged the EPA with protecting the American people and their environment.
People saw the agency as their vigilant watchdog: sharp in tooth and claw-fiercely defending while they
slept. But, the price of freedom is eternal vigilance-and while we slumbered, something happened to
the watch-dog. lts teeth fell out, its eyes clouded with cataracts; it became deaf and it appears to have
been castrated. lf the EPA was ever the “people’s watchdog” it arguably became the ‘pesticide
industries pooch’ when George W Bush made Linda Fisher, a Monsanto lobbyist, number two at the
agency in 2010; the EPA’s track record since is not reassuring.
ln 1991 a train was derailed at Dunsmuir above Lake Shasta, spilling 19,000 gallons of a pesticide
called Metam Sodium into California’s Sacramento River; this exterrninated all life for 42 miles
downstream. lt killed a rnillion trout along with millions of other fish, insects, frogs and water birds. lt
poisoned most of the trees on both banks and put 600 people in the hospital. €ongresswoman Barbara
Bsxer later asked Don Clay, an EPA official, why metam sodium was not on the EPA’s register of
‘hazardous chemicals if it could kill people as well as fish? €lay replied: ‘The number of fish killed or the
number of people killed is not the criterion we use in labeling something ‘hazardous”‘. Boxer was livid
with anger, but the EPA still refused to list metam sodium as ‘hazardous’ and 25,000 tons are used
annually in America today.
Linda Fisher, EPA Assistant Administrator of pesticides and former lobbyist for Monsanto
admitted that the EPA had studies from 1987 liking metam sodium to birth defects in lab rats, but she
said. “birth defects were not enough to warrant a ‘hazardous chemical’ designation by the EPA.” One
wonders what the EPA regards as ‘hazardous’? Plutonium maybe?
ln December 2010, on petition by the NRDC, a federal Judge in New York invalidated EPA’s
approval of Bayer’s pesticide spirotetramat {Movento} because it kills bee brood, and ordered the
agency to re-evaluate the chemical in compliance with the law.
The EPA’s own review found that residues of Novento brought to the hive by forager bees
caused “significant mortality” and “massive perturbation” to larval honey bees. But the EPA licensed it
anyway.
NRDC Senior Attorney Aaron Colangelo said. “EPA admitted to approving the pesticide illegally,
but argued that its violations of the law should have no consequences. The Court ordered the pesticide
to be taken off the market until it has been properly evaluated. Bayer should not be permitted to run
what amounts to an uncontrolled experiment on bees across the country without full consideration of
the consequences.”
Apparently the EP,A will not refuse registration of a pesticide even when it is highly toxic to
bees? Jennifer Sass of the NRDC wrote that of the 94 pesticides licensed by the EPA since 1997, 79%
were granted a ‘condition’ license without completed safety studies. lf the EPA granted licenses to
lmidacloprid, Clothianidin and Spirotetremat-all of which have been independently confirmed as being
‘highly toxic to honey bees’, would they even refuse a license to any bee poison?
The EPA gobbled up $10 billion of taxpayer’s money in 2010. Well, on the basis of how they
protect bees and beekeepers from dangerous pesticides, I have an idea on how to save some money.
Why not fire the entire pesticides department? just pay the janitor to sit at a table with a rubber stamp
and give a conditional license to everything that comes through the door. The result would arguably be
exactly the same as it is currently-everything gets approved, nothing is rejected, and think of the money
you would save!”
According to the EPA database, American farmers used over 1 billion pounds of crop pesticides
in 2007 {500,000 tons- that’s just over three pounds per person, for every person in the U.S.} of these 99
million pounds (50,000 tons) were insecticides. Maryann Frazier’s work at Penn State found up to 37
pesticides in any one load of pollen brought home by bee foragers, and an average of four pesticides per
pollen load. Beekeepers are sending bees out into a landscape that is saturated with a lethal cocktail of
dozens of different bee-poisons.
It appears that bees are ‘expendable’or are mere tollateral damage’ in the undeclared, all out,
‘War against Nature’which is being waged by pesticide companies, in collusian with the EPA.
l’m not sure what beekeepers can do about any of this-but arguing the science is not going to
save the bees; the WPA threw the science out of the window when they licensed Clothianidin against
the advice of their own experts. The so-called ‘science’ is nothing but camouflage to prop up a billion
dollar poisons industry, for which the WPA serves more as sock-puppets than watchdog.
I suspect that political action {French style), and the loss of millions more bee colonies, leading
to crop failures, will be the only things that will finally bring the EPA back to reality, Billions more bees,
butterflies and bumbles will surely die in the coming season, and nobody knows what the implications
are for drinking water and human health.
An agency that consumes $10 billion of taxpayers’ money each year must surely be ethical,
transparent, scientifically scrupulous and accountable, in its enforcement of the Law. Why should the
citizens of the U.S. have to raise more money to drag the WPA kicking and screaming into the courts, to
force it to uphold the very environmental laws it was responsible for policing in the first place?