Ontario looking to restrict use of bee-killing pesticides

Farmers pan province’s bee protection plan – CTV Barrie

Province to consult with agriculture and could move by 2015

By Susan Noakes, CBC News  Jul 07, 2014

Ontario plans to consult with growers and agricultural representatives over the next few months to reduce or eliminate use of neonicotinoids – a class of chemicals implicated in the deaths of bees.

Ontario Agriculture Minister Jeff Leal said the province wants to “move away from the widespread, indiscriminate use of neonicotinoid-based pesticides.”

“I am committed to finding a balanced approach, based in science, that addresses the important role both pollinators and growers play in Ontario’s agri-food industry,” Leal said in a statement.

“Over the coming months I want to first consult with industry, farmers and environmental stakeholders on options that are practical, including the consideration of a licence system.”

The province stopped short of saying it would impose a ban, as it did with the cosmetic pesticides used on lawns and golf courses.

But the minister said he hoped to develop a system by 2015 that would ensure the pesticide is used only where there is “demonstrated need.”

Ontario can block sale of chemicals

Ontario doesn’t have the power to ban neonicotinoids – a class of chemicals also known as neonics – but it can ban their sale in the province as it did with lawn chemicals.

Up to 100 per cent of corn seed and half of soybean seed is grown using neonics.

Beekeepers have expressed concern about neonics for years and the agriculture industry is worried it will not have the pollinators it needs to keep fruits and vegetables developing.

“Fully a third of our food relies on pollinators: without bees, Ontario’s food supply could be in serious trouble,” Ontario Beekeeper’s Association says in a petition to Premier Kathleen Wynne asking for a ban on the pesticides.

A Health Canada study linked widespread deaths of bees to use of the chemicals.

Evidence mounts against neonics

Evidence has been mounting linking neonicotinoids to bee mortality. In late June, the Task Force on Systemic Pesticides, a group of 50 scientists from around the world, released a study of the literature about the long-term impact of neonics and concluded they ought to be banned.

Plants sprayed with neonics can remain toxic for years and that can affect entire ecosystems, they found.

Neonics are a family of chemicals that disrupt the central nervous systems of insects and can discourage pests like aphids and grubs for the life of a plant.

One of the problems with them, as far as bees are concerned, is that they are systemic pesticides, that are applied to seeds and roots but then become become incorporated into the plant and can show up in leaves, pollen, nectar, fruit and flowers.

Several retail chains that sell home garden plants have said they are reviewing practices at their suppliers over use of neonicotinoids.

Retailers review neonics on nursery plants

Rona, Canadian Tire and Home Depot have been under pressure since a Friends of the Earth study in Canada found neonics in the flowers and pollen of plants that had begun life in their nurseries.

Friends of the Earth tested home garden plants, including bee-friendly plants such as Shasta daisy and salvia, for the pesticide and found more than half of plants in garden centres in Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver contained neonics.

Rona and Canadian Tire said they were working with their vendors to assess how neonicotinoids are used by plant nurseries in wake of the Friends of the Earth report. Home Depot said it is working with its suppliers “to understand the science and find alternatives.”

A Rona spokeswoman said the company has “been paying close attention to the neonicotinoid pesticides issue.”

“Since we favour an approach based on dialogue and continuous improvement with our suppliers, we will complete our due diligence with them and then apply the business recommendations accordingly,” the company said in a statement.

A Canadian Tire statement pointed to Health Canada’s efforts to review the impact of neonics.

Health Canada ‘monitoring’

Health Canada put in guidelines last year for the soybean and corn growers, who use neonicotinoids on the seeds, demanding a dust-reducing lubricant to prevent the pesticide spreading at seeding time.

But it is monitoring whether this reduced bee mortality in 2014 and has demanded additional information on whether the chemicals are actually needed in agriculture.

It could introduce new measures for 2015 or halt the use of neonicotinoids altogether.

The European Union has already banned the chemicals.

Bee foraging skills impaired by neonicotinoid pesticides

RFID tags used to keep tabs on individual bees

By Emily Chung, CBC News Jul 08, 2014

Popular pesticides linked to declines in bee populations appear to harm bumblebees by impairing their ability to learn how to gather food, new research shows.

Young adult bumblebees normally take some time to learn how to land on flowers, collect pollen and pack it onto their legs so they can carry it back to their hive, said Nigel Raine, a professor and bee researcher at the University of Guelph.

While bees usually come back to the hive with more and more pollen as they become more experienced foragers, a new study conducted by Raine and Imperial College biologist Richard Gill shows that isn’t the case for bees exposed to neonicotinoid pesticides.

“They started off worse than control, unexposed individuals and they never got any better — and in some cases actually their performance deteriorated,” Raine said in an interview. “This kind of suggests that something is not allowing them to continue the normal process of learning how to handle flowers and collect pollen.”

The study, published today in the British Ecological Society’s journal Functional Ecology, also found that the effects were amplified when colonies were exposed to a second kind of pesticide, pyrethroid, along with the neonicotinoid. Colonies exposed to both pesticides were more prone to fail and lose all their bees.

The results suggests bumblebees are quite sensitive to neonicotinoids, Raine said. He added that they are likely more sensitive than honeybees, since their colonies are so much smaller — hundreds of individuals rather than the tens of thousands seen in honeybee colonies.

Neonicotinoid pesticides are commonly coated on agricultural seeds for crops such as corn and canola to protect the plants from insect pests such as aphids. The chemicals act as a neurotoxin toward insects. According to the Canola Council of Canada, almost all of the 21 million acres of canola planted in Canada are treated with neonicotinoids. Bayer Crop Sciences, which makes the pesticide, reported that in 2012 that 90 per cent of U.S. corn was also treated.

A number of studies have shown that bees exposed to the pesticides have smaller colonies, often fail to return to their hives and may have trouble navigating.

That has led to a partial, temporary ban on the pesticides in Europe, and a recent call for a wider ban from some scientists. In Canada, Ontario announced this week that it is moving towards restricting the use of neonicotinoids.

The goal of Raine’s and Gill’s study was to see how the pesticides affected the foraging behaviour of individual bees in a situation that mimicked, as closely as possible, conditions in the wild.

In order to do that, the researchers allowed 40 new, young colonies of bees to forage in the wild for four weeks at a time, but later in the growing season when their exposure to pesticides from farm fields should normally be very low.

They offered different colonies of bees small amounts of pesticide-laced sugar water containing:

• A neonicotinoid pesticide called imidacloprid, or
• A pyrethroid pesticide called lambda cyhalothrin, or
• A mixture of the two pesticides.

The pesticide levels were designed to be similar to what bees would be exposed to from pesticide-treated crops. A control group of 10 colonies were offered plain sugar water.

The researchers found that the bees chose to drink all the sugar water, regardless of whether it contained pesticides or not.

Different flowers

Bees were identified with RFID tags – the same technology used by many companies such as Amazon to track the movement of packages. The tags, which weight two micrograms, and did not affect the bees’ ability to fly, were glued to each bee. RFID readers placed at the entrance to the hive recorded when each bee passed by, allowing researchers to track each individual as it entered and left the hive.

Observers recorded the size of the load of pollen each was carrying, as well as the type of flower it was from, based on its colour. The observation was not double-blind, but Raine said any bias should be minimized by the fact that the three observers were constantly rotated from hive to hive.

Bees exposed to the pyrethroid pesticide had higher mortality, but didn’t seem to experience any long-term effects.

Bees exposed to neonicotinoids, however, had changes in behaviour. They didn’t just bring back less pollen compared to unexposed bees with the same level of experience. They also chose different flowers to collect pollen from.

“The effects were really striking,” Raine said.

The researchers weren’t sure whether the pesticides were influencing bees’ ability to choose flowers or whether they were simply choosing flowers that were easier to land on and collect pollen from.

The study found neonicotinoid-exposed colonies initially sent out more foragers, apparently to compensate for the smaller amounts of pollen collected.  However, by the end of the experiment, their forager numbers had dropped,  the foragers were foraging for longer periods of time, and they were increasingly coming back with no pollen.

“The acute and chronically impaired pollen foraging performance induced by neonicotinoid exposure shown in this study has implications for colony growth and survival,” the researchers wrote.

A previously published analysis of the study, focused on the effects on the colony rather than the individuals, showed that colonies exposed to neonicotinoids had 25 per cent fewer workers and were significantly smaller at the end of the study period, Raine said.

“What this and previous work from my lab shows is that these kinds of small impacts on individuals are feeding up to colony level impacts,” he added.

Raine thinks small, long-term effects of pesticides like this should be included in tests to determine whether they should be approved or re-approved.