Combined Pesticide Exposure Severely Affects Individual- and Colony-Level Traits

You forget that we live in a "what can you $ do for $ me today" society.

A little catastrophic collateral damage can't stand in the way of super farms and other cash crops making the maximum amount of profit for today's owners.

You're right, too. Those same flat earthers that deny climate damage due to CO2 and other pollutants will just tell you to let 'em eat cake.

It's too late for the bees and maybe us, too.

I wonder how productive this world would be without chemical pesticides, herbicides and fertilzers.

No, actually I don't.

I've seen organic fruit and vegetables. And I don't believe organic grown fuits and vegtable can feed the world.

So you have a choice!

Start buying organical grown foodstuff at sometimes 5 times the price, or eat at your own risk.

The jury is still out. We'll see just how smart a species we are in the long run. Well, I probably won't.

Some thoughts:

1) evolution has been dealing with this issue since life was invented -- it doesn't come up with perfect solutions, it tries all solutions randomly until one or a handful of solutions dominates. That means that everyone is a work-in-progress and that no species is finished. Every time a change happens that affects transmission of traits, other traits have a better chance of establishing, everything from acclimation to a new environment to changes in sensory organs to biological processes being modified. Up to a certain level of stress, all living things can and will adapt even if only in a generational sense.

2) No one can investigate anything EXHAUSTIVELY. When you are talking about combinations of substances in the ppm level of exposure having compound or synergistic effects especially accumulating over time (both in the environment AND in tissues -- add the food chain to interactions now), think of all the substances we create and ALL THE SUBSTANCES ALREADY in the environment, natural or man-modified, and you get into astronomical numbers before morning coffee. When you add environmental modification (chemical breakdown, side reactions, heat, light, fire, lightning, water) and the list is truly open-ended.

3) Even if you allow for all the substances you know about AND can quantify in a particular environment, you get issues with unique substances interacting from other environments -- invasive species of animals and plants, in addition to man-introduced substances -- you inevitably overlook issues.

4) Unless someone quantifies all organic processes -- not just biological -- it is IMPOSSIBLE for people to have the knowledge to predict all these interactions, period.

5) All people can do is come up with a mutually agreed upon level of investigation needed before introducing a new quantity into their environment -- that is what we call law. Over time, that mutual agreement WILL change as our understanding grows, but until then, we can only do what we know, or can guess at, to do. ALL changes, natural or man-made, stress environments.

6) How can someone invent anything from a chemical viewpoint if nothing can be considered safely investigated? At what point, given that life consists of choices, results, and random events, do we consider a risk acceptable? At what point of consequences and remove in time and interaction do we consider a person not morally responsible for their products even if the product is used as intended? Just yesterday, we had a posting about the government banning a toy (buckyball magnets) because children were swallowing the things -- even with the warnings in packaging. The company that produced them will, I am sure be sued over that even though they marketed it as a novelty for adults and not as a children's toy. Where does the line of "foreseeable" get drawn, especially when human knowledge is ALWAYS growing?

The magazine NATURE stopped being a science based monthly years ago. It now publishes from a political agenda. Just read a few more issues, it is not hard to see at all. crow

So, are you going to tell us that bees aren't dying by the billions and it's just a figment of our imagination?

Nobody here was debating the philosophical or political agenda of the publication.

Don't change the subject to politics when we were talking about bees dying.

I'd get a new tag line. "Closed biased minds are utterly impervious to any factual evidence which contradicts their beliefs" sounds too much like you.

then if any resource that is band because there may be a possiblity of any indication of a political agenda.

then this post would be closed!

real scientists have discovered several reasons for the bee population issues. pesticides are not one of the big reasons.

Oh, OK, that settles it. Care to list any of your "real" scientists?

I'll bet these same "real scientists" have proven that air pollution and global warming do not exist, and breathing coal dust makes you healthy.

Get real.

have to add a reference to that.

And chosse your sources .............. wisely.

The study was of 2 bumble bee colonies; not honey bees. A distinction that, while not critical, should be made. Physiology is probably very similar.

The article doesn't try to quantify how much the pesticides influence overall bee populations, only that it is a likely contributing factor, implied by the statement, "significant reductions in brood development and colony success." The introduction explains it as one of the few studies of the "combinatorial effects of pesticide exposure."

Also, citation #12 of the article is in line with the reference by ronwagn (post #11).

The authors cite the differential between their observed "behavioral" effects occurring between 2-4 weeks, vs. the current guideline of 96 hours, set by European and Mediterranean Plant Protection Organisation (EPPO) and the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), for judging safety of exposure. Once again, shorter-term, vs. longer-term analysis, where death is the more likely criteria for "safety." If we only observed people exposed to flu or any other virus for less than the incubation period, we would conclude that viral exposure doesn't result in disease.

As to the politics of Nature as a science magazine, I have never subscribed to it, nor had much occasion to read it, so I can't comment on that. I literally saw it in passing on a table top and noticed the article. But I would be surprised if all submitted articles have a political agenda.

Part of the authors agenda seems to be to call for extending the exposure period to a longer time frame before passing judgment and to include non-death events in the analysis.

Nicotinoids have been implicated. A quick search gave many references:http://www.xerces.org/neonicotinoids-and-bees/