Pesticide exposure is a big problem in the keeping today especially because of
the possibility of synergistic effects.
Beekeeping in a past was easy, find a good location,
establish your apiary, and done. You could go fishing and hunting and come back
later to collect the benefits of Mother Nature.
Today there are so many random events that come and go the makes harder and
harder every day for beekeepers. Consistency is gone and in today's video
I want to talk about something that I believe is an important contributor for
this problem, the synergistic effect of a pesticide.
I'm Humberto Boncristiani and this is inside the hive.TV the show that takes
you into the world of bees. If you like bees and want to know more about them
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single video. How the toxicity of a pesticide is calculated? I standard
procedure to calculate toxicity, it is to calculate what they call Lethal Dose 50
or LD50. In this procedure we exposed bees to increased concentration of a
pesticide in laboratory conditions until you reach the concentration that
kill 50% of the bees exposed. This is the number that tells you how toxic a
pesticide is, the lower the number more toxic it is. What is synergistic effect?
Synergistic effects between compounds happen when the toxicity off a pesticide
combination is greater than the toxicity of the each individual compound in the
mixture. In other words, one plus one is not two
as expected, it could be 10 1000 or even more. In
honeybees this is well documented, for example in 2013 Dr. Reed Johnson today
at the Ohio State University publish an article that in my opinion is a slap
in the face to anyone that reject the idea that pesticides can be a problem. I
encourage everyone to read this article. There are plenty of good information
there, link in the description below. Dr. Reid Johnston measured several
interactions between well-known miticides constantly used in beekeeping
operations and pesticides using in agro-industry, for example fungicides and
other chemicals. In this article Dr. Johnson described that tau-fluvalinate
a miticide commonly used in beekeeping operations has an LD50 of 19.8
micrograms per Bee, he also describes that LD50 of coumaphos, another miticide
using it by beekeepers is 31.2 micrograms per bee, however when
Tao-fluvalinate is in the presence of only 3 micrograms of coumaphos, the
LD50 of tau-fluvalinate drops from 19.8 to only 0.78 micrograms per bee.
Meaning that in this case tau-fluvalinate is 25 times more powerful
to damage bees, let me give you another good example that you can find in this
article. The same tau-fluvalinate has its LD50 dropping from 19.8 to only 0.01
micrograms/bee in the presence of only 10 micrograms of a fungicide called Prochrorax
You might think be thinking that Prochrorax might be super toxic to
bees, actually nope Prochrorax LD50 is 14.89 in this case tau-fluvalinate
is 2,000 times more powerful to bees in the presence of that
fungicide. What is the problem here? the problem is that regulatory agencies
approve a use of a drug based on the toxicity of the individual compound
and not based on any interaction or combination that it might occur, so you
think you're safe you're applying a product but if there is anything else
there there is the possibility that you can get very unpleasant surprises.
Dr. Christopher Mullin in 2010 demonstrated that there are hundreds of pesticides
that can accumulate on a honeycomb. honeybees are exposed to so many
different things in their foraging. Just a simple calculation so you can understand
the problem here. To test a hundred pesticides in a subset of five you end
up with 75 million possible combinations to be test, for that you need probably
all bees in the United States to achieve that. Regulatory agencies cannot test all
possible combinations of a drug interaction to approve a new drug. it's
too expensive is too much labor. They will never do it. In my travels visiting
several beekeepers all over the United States and abroad I constantly meet very
serious organized knowledgeable beekeepers with decades of experience.
They comes to me saying that terrible things happen in their apiary and they
have absolutely no clue what happen. some even confess that they stop talking because
they feel embarrassed they say the people is
going to judge them as bad beekeepers and nobody will believe them. What a
situation. The synergistic effect of pesticides can clearly be linked to
cases like that. We apply a product and the product interact with something else
in the surroundings boom you have a whole apiary dead
Please don't thinking that you're safe because you're using something "natural"
synergistic effect can happen with any chemical anything any chemical can
trigger a synergistic effect like that. Have you experienced some sort of
mystery events in your apiaries? Have you heard someone describing something crazy
going on? would you mind to share it here? Please
leave your story in your comment section below
stories like that help to guide research direction sometimes, they might
help. I hope this was useful good luck out there fellow beekeepers if you like
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