Honey bees in danger due to pesticide use in cotton

Bees in Danger

Last month I posted my article on 'Vanishing Bees'.

I tried to highlight the the dangers with chemicals to the 20,000 odd bee species, not just honey bees. As little as 1-4 nano gram of insecticides such as Fipronil and neonicotinoid insecticides can kill a bee. This would translate to 1-4 grams of the insecticide could kill one billion bees. Every year Bt-cotton seeds in India are treated with 120,000 kg neonicotinoid insecticides and at least about thrice this quantity is sprayed in cotton fields mostly during flowering period to control sap-sucking insects. These deadly insecticides are absorbed by plant tissues and are carried by bees as pollen, nectar and extruded sap into hives to feed young ones. Additionally, insecticides such as dimethoate, oxalic acid, formic acid, amitraz, coumaphos, synthetic pyrethroids flumethrin and fluvalinate are commonly used for the control of mites in apiaries. These are also deadly toxic to bees. Millions of bees may have died especially over the past 15 years of continued use of neonicotinoid insecticides and we will never know the negative consequences that this may have had on food crops, fruit crops, vegetables and of course agriculture itself. I mentioned in my article that Neonicotinoids have strong toxicity through contact action. "Insecticides such as imidacloprid, clothianidin, thiomethoxam and dinotefuran showed high toxicity to honey bees at very low concentrations. As oral poison, a dose as low as 3.7 to 7.6 nano grams per bee of any of these insecticides would be sufficient to kill at least 50% of the honey bee populations. To explain further, for example, 7.4 grams of imidacloprid can kill one billion honey bees...A dose of 18 to 22 nano grams per bee can kill 50% of a population through contact action. It is estimated that each square cm area on the plant parts of a crop is likely to have a range of 20 to 200 ng of the toxin if 20 grams of insecticide is sprayed per hectare. Therefore neonicotinoids pose a direct risk of contact poisoning when the bees alight on treated surfaces....Two years ago the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) examined several factors and decided on 1^st December 2013 to restrict the use of three pesticides clothianidin, imidacloprid and thiamethoxam, belonging to the neonicotinoid group of insecticides as seed treatment, soil application and foliar sprays for a period of two years in all the 28 member states of the European Union."

The continued excessive use of these insecticides and the least attention that this important issue receives in India, are both matters of GRAVE concern. Hope some good sense dawns on the powers that be, so that we save our bees and agriculture from these deadly poisons.