Oregon Bans Over 12 Pesticides for 180 Days After Bee Die-Off

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Image: Raw For Beauty

State officials in Oregon are temporarily restricting the use of more than a dozen pesticide products following the deaths of an estimated 50,000 bumblebees in the Portland area this month.

The measure, effective immediately, will last for 180 days while the Oregon State Agricultural Department investigates incidents of a mass bee die-off in the Portland suburb of Wilsonville, and a much smaller die-off in neighboring Hillsboro.

Eighteen pesticide products containing the active ingredient dinotefuran and used for ornamental, turf and agricultural applications have been banned for now.

“I have directed the agency to take this step in an effort to minimize any potential for additional incidents involving bee deaths connected to pesticide products with this active ingredient until such time as our investigation is completed and we have more information,” the agency’s director, Katy Coba, said in a statement released Thursday.

“Conclusions from the investigation will help us and our partners evaluate whether additional steps need to be considered.”

A pesticide known as Safari, which contains dinotefuran and belongs to a class called neonicotinoids, caused the deaths of an estimated 50,000 bumblebees  in a Target parking lot in Wilsonville this month, authorities said. Crews have wrapped the affected linden trees around the lot with protective netting to prevent further deaths.

The staggering number marks the world’s largest recorded mass-die off of bumblebees, experts said. Initial estimates pegged the number of deaths at 25,000, but that figure doubled after a second assessment, said Scott Hoffman Black, executive director of the Portland-based Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation.

Late last week, a second report of dead bumblebees emerged in the Portland suburb of Hillsboro. City officials were alerted a week ago to a cluster of at least 100 bees on the ground beneath a single linden tree downtown.

Following Wilsonville’s lead, the city of Hillsboro bought netting to wrap around the tree, public affairs manager Patrick Preston told the Los Angeles Times. The Oregon Department of Agriculture visited the site to take samples and test whether pesticides also played a role. 

The city of Hillsboro sprayed 200 trees with Safari in March, Preston said. As the trees were not flowering at the time, city officials were following label directions, he said.

The city has sprayed the trees with Safari for the past three years. This is the first time bee deaths have been reported, Preston said.

“If Safari is found to have been behind the bee deaths then we will not be using it anymore,” Preston said.

Valent U.S.A. Corp., the manufacturer of Safari, said in a statement this week that it was making a donation to pay for the protective netting surrounding the Wilsonville trees.  The company also sent an entomologist to work with city and state officials.

The company said it is committed to protecting pollinators, noting the product label warns against applying the product or allowing it to drift to blooming foliage if bees are present.

“Valent also promotes the responsible use of our products, and we are actively conducting outreach with our customers and industry partners to reinforce the importance of responsible use according to label guidelines,” the statement said.

But scientists with the Xerces Society said the discovery in Hillsboro shows that the pesticide can have a lasting impact in the environment, and have urged city and county governments to ban the cosmetic use of pesticides entirely.

Meanwhile, Portland’s ecologically-minded activists have organized a memorial for the dead bees. Organizer Rozzell Medina, an artist and educational activist in Portland, said that once he heard the bee deaths were caused by a pesticide, he became “very sad about it, very concerned.”

Medina soon realized that others in the community shared his distress. He decided to plan a memorial where people could gather, share information and discuss the incident.   

“This isn’t a funeral,” Medina, who earned a master’s in leadership and sustainability education from Portland State University and now works there as a program coordinator, told the Los Angeles Times on Thursday. “We’re not there to bury the bees or build little bee coffins. We’re going there to talk about what this means.”

The event will take place in the Target parking lot in Wilsonville where the bees were discovered.

Sources: Raw For Beauty
LAtimes.com

Nearly 80 Teens Hospitalized After Pesticide Exposure

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Remember when farm work was a wholesome summer job for kids looking for a little extra pocket money?

Back in the day, teens could work outside, learn about farming, and do some healthy physical labor without major health risks.  Working on a farm built physical strength, skills, and character.

Now, with the advent of toxic agricultural practices, farm work can be deadly because of exposure to glyphosate and other deadly chemicals.

Nearly 80 teenagers working for

Team Corn, a Princeton, Ill.-based company that contracts for Monsanto were sent to the hospital yesterday after a crop-duster sprayed the field they were working in with fungicide.

The teenagers were detasseling corn when the chemical drifted over them from a plane that was crop-dusting an adjacent field, said Tom Helscher, a spokesman for Monsanto, the St. Louis-based company using the field to produce seed corn. Pesotum is about 15 miles south of Urbana….

 "…Detasselers – commonly teenagers looking for summer jobs – pull the pollinating tassels off the top of corn plants that will produce seed for future planting… 

…The 79 teens were decontaminated by firefighters at the field just outside Pesotum and then taken to the Carle Foundation Hospital’s emergency room in Urbana to be treated for what appeared to be minor ailments, hospital officials said. 

Emergency room director Allen Rinehart said some of the teen workers had irritated skin but that they were all stable and being released to their parents as they were seen." (source)

The media glossed over the incident, emphasizing that the injuries were minor and that the kids were treated and immediately released from the hospital.

There is no doubt this was an unfortunate accident. As long as agriculture practices these highly toxic methods, though, we will continue to see such accidents. There would be no such risk of poisoning on a farm that implemented organic methods.

But considering that people spraying for Monsanto are generally pictured wearing head to toe protection as well as a respirator, and that reported health issues from chemical drift are severe, including cancer, miscarriage, asthma and birth defects, one has to wonder if the real injuries to these teens will show up a few years down the road.

With this direct exposure, will these kids join the long line of victims of Monsanto?

Source: The Organic Prepper

Daisy Luther is a freelance writer and editor.  Her website, The Organic Prepper, offers information on healthy prepping, including premium nutritional choices, general wellness and non-tech solutions. You can follow Daisy on Facebook and Twitter, and you can email her at daisy@theorganicprepper.ca

Study: Pesticides Are Leading Cause of Bee Die-Offs

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As we’ve written before, the mysterious mass die-off of honey bees that pollinate $30 billion worth of crops in the US has so decimated America’s apis mellifera population that one bad winter could leave fallow. Now, a new study has pinpointed some of the probable causes of bee deaths and the rather scary results show that averting beemageddon will be much more difficult than previously thought.

Photo: Ben Margot

Scientists had struggled to find the trigger for so-called Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) that has wiped out an estimated 10 million beehives, worth $2 billion, over the past six years. Suspects have included pesticides, disease-bearing parasites and poor nutrition. But in a first-of-its-kind study published today in the journal PLOS, scientists at the University of Maryland and the US Department of Agriculture have identified a witch’s brew of pesticides and fungicides contaminating pollen that bees collect to feed their hives. The findings break new ground on why large numbers of bees are dying though they do not identify the specific cause of CCD, where an entire beehive dies at once.

When researchers collected pollen from hives on the east coast pollinating cranberry, watermelon and other crops and fed it to healthy bees, those bees showed a significant decline in their ability to resist infection by a parasite called Nosema ceranae. The parasite has been implicated in Colony Collapse Disorder though scientists took pains to point out that their findings do not directly link the pesticides to CCD. The pollen was contaminated on average with nine different pesticides and fungicides though scientists discovered 21 agricultural chemicals in one sample. Scientists identified eight ag chemicals associated with increased risk of infection by the parasite.

Most disturbing, bees that ate pollen contaminated with fungicides were three times as likely to be infected by the parasite. Widely used, fungicides had been thought to be harmless for bees as they’re designed to kill fungus, not insects, on crops like apples.

“There’s growing evidence that fungicides may be affecting the bees on their own and I think what it highlights is a need to reassess how we label these agricultural chemicals,” Dennis VanEngelsdorp, the study’s lead author, told Quartz.

Labels on pesticides warn farmers not to spray when pollinating bees are in the vicinity but such precautions have not applied to fungicides.

Bee populations are so low in the US that it now takes 60% of the country’s surviving colonies just to pollinate one California crop, almonds. And that’s not just a west coast problem—California supplies 80% of the world’s almonds, a market worth $4 billion.

In recent years, a class of chemicals called neonicotinoids has been linked to bee deaths and in April regulators banned the use of the pesticide for two years in Europe where bee populations have also plummeted. But VanEngelsdorp, an assistant research scientist at the University of Maryland, says the new study shows that the interaction of multiple pesticides is affecting bee health
.
“The pesticide issue in itself is much more complex than we have led to be believe,” he says. “It’s a lot more complicated than just one product, which means of course the solution does not lie in just banning one class of product.”

The study found another complication in efforts to save the bees: US honey bees, which are descendants of European bees, do not bring home pollen from native North American crops but collect bee chow from nearby weeds and wildflowers. That pollen, however, was also contaminated with pesticides even though those plants were not the target of spraying.

“It’s not clear whether the pesticides are drifting over to those plants but we need take a new look at agricultural spraying practices,” says VanEngelsdorp.

Sources: Raw For Beauty
qz.com