Germans ban pesticide linked to bee colony collapse
The German government has banned the use of a family of pesticides that researchers there believe are responsible for the recent precipitous decline in honeybees worldwide.
The German Research Center for Cultivated Plants now says that the problem is mainly the fault of Clothianidin, a synthetic form of nicotine that attacks the nervous system of insects, according to a story published by Natural News on Sept. 30. CropScience, a subsidiary of Bayer, the German chemical titan, manufactures the insecticide under the brand name Poncho in Europe.
The Coalition Against Bayer Dangers, a German environmental group, sued Bayer in August, accusing the company of “marketing dangerous pesticides and thereby accepting the mass death of bees all over the world.”
Bayer sells Clothianidian under several different names. The products are used to treat corn seed and for an array of other agricultural and pest-control purposes in more than 70 countries, including the United States. The company started using Clothianidian after its patent expired on Imidicloprid, a closely related chemical.
The decline in these tiny foragers has had an impact on more than just honey production. 
Honeybees are also used globally to pollinate fruit and vegetable crops. More than 90 crops rely on honeybee pollination in the United States. A study several years ago estimated the annual value of bee-pollinated crops at nearly $14.6 billion.
In North America, commercial beekeepers began noticing that bees were not returning to their hives in late 2006. The dire situation raised concerns among scientists, who dubbed the mysterious malady Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD).
But the problem didn’t garner any mainstream media attention in the U.S. until mid-2007. By then, commercial beekeepers were reporting losses from CCD of up to 80 percent. American researchers, including entomologists at the University of Illinois, were initially uncertain of the cause and hesitant to blame Bayer’s product even though the French government first banned its use in 1999, after millions of bees began dying off there.
The French ban on Bayer’s pesticide received scant media attention in the U.S., and the more recent German ban is being similarly ignored now.
I learned about the plight of the honeybees quite by accident while visiting Germany in the spring of 2007. I was watching television in my Heidelberg hotel room when a news report aired on the drastic decline of honeybees in the U.S. The account drew my attention because I had tended bees briefly many years ago. Even though I didn’t understand the German voiceover, I could hear some of the American beekeepers that were interviewed. 
Something was drastically wrong. Honeybee populations were plummeting across the country and nobody knew why.
The issue also raised my journalistic curiosity because I hadn’t heard a word about this problem before going abroad. I was thousands of miles away from home and I was receiving news about an issue that hadn’t even been reported yet in the U.S. I e-mailed the little bit I knew to an editor of a Midwestern newsweekly; he encouraged me to pursue it. A month later, Illinois Times featured the story on its cover. It would be weeks before the mainstream media recognized the problem. Salon, the online magazine, is among mainstream news organizations that have recently explored the pesticide angle.
Despite the ubiquitous use of the Internet and the development of global economies, news about the potential extinction of an entire species and eminent disruption of the world food supply still travels slowly between Europe and North America.
Meanwhile, the use of the Bayer pesticides continues unabated in the U.S. – C.D. Stelzer (cdstelzer@yahoo.com)
