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
please consider to subscribe and also
hit the bell button so you don't miss a
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
this video please hit the like button
that helps a lot keep doing them for you
also share with friends and family they
might have a story to tell here
subscribe if you didn't already and I
will see you guys in the next video
thanks for watching
inside the hata TV show about bee
