Kevin Laliberte
Editor, Smoky River Express

Germany has banned a family of pesticides which are linked to the deaths of millions of honeybees. And it’s a situation which is raising some eyebrows among beekeepers in Canada and the United States. The German Federal Office of Consumer Protection and Food Safety (BVL) recently suspended the registration of eight pesticide seed treatment products used in rapeseed oil and sweetcorn. The move follows reports from German beekeepers in the Baden-Württemberg region that two-thirds of their bees died earlier this month following the application of a pesticide called clothianidin. “It’s a real bee emergency,” says Manfred Hederer, president of the German Professional Beekeepers’ Association. “Fifty to 60 per cent of the bees have died on average and some beekeepers have lost all their hives.” Tests on dead bees showed that 99 per cent of those examined had a build-up of clothianidin – a chemical, produced by Bayer CropScience (a subsidiary of the German chemical giant Bayer). The chemical was applied to the seeds of sweetcorn planted along the Rhine River this spring. The seeds are treated in advance of being planted or are sprayed while in the field. The company says an application error by the seed company which failed to use the glue-like substance that sticks the pesticide to the seed, led to the chemical getting into the air. Clothianidin, like the other neonicotinoid pesticides that have been temporarily suspended in Germany, is a systemic chemical that works its way through a plant and attacks the nervous system of any insect it comes into contact with. According to the US Environmental Protection Agency it is “highly toxic” to honeybees. This is not the first time that Bayer, one of the world’s leading pesticide manufacturers has been blamed for killing honeybees. In the United States, a group of beekeepers from North Dakota is taking the company to court after losing thousands of honeybee colonies in 1995, during a period when oilseed rape in the area was treated with imidacloprid. A third of honeybees were killed by what has since been dubbed “colony collapse disorder” (CCD). Bayer’s best selling pesticide, imidacloprid, sold under the name Gaucho in France, has been banned as a seed dressing for sunflowers in that country since 1999, after a third of French honeybees died following its widespread use. Bayer has always maintained that imidacloprid is safe for bees if correctly applied. Here in Canada, the experience of beekeepers closely echoes those in the U.S., where 36 percent of the nation’s commercially managed hives have been lost since last year, according to a survey commissioned by the Apiary Inspectors of America and released in May. Paul Laflamme, who was raised in the Smoky River region and is now head of Alberta Agriculture and Food’s pest management branch, says that while many U.S. losses have been blamed on CCD, no official cases of CCD have been confirmed in Canada. Instead, the two parasitic mites that started infesting bee colonies in the mid-1980s are seen as the primary reason for the failure of colonies across Canada. The tracheal mite sucks blood from honeybees by burrowing into a bee’s windpipe. The larger Varroa mite lives on the outside of bees and destroys the insects’ reproductive cycle. Beekeepers have been using pesticides but it now appears the pesticides have lost their effectiveness. “There are only two miticides registered in Canada to control these mites, and the mites have developed a resistance to both of them,” says LaFlamme.

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