EPA plans temporary pesticide restrictions while bees feed

[Omaha Steve]

Source: AP-Excite

By SETH BORENSTEIN

WASHINGTON (AP) — If honeybees are busy pollinating large, blooming croplands, farmers wanting to spray toxic pesticides will soon have to buzz off, the Environmental Protection Agency is proposing.

A federal rule to be proposed Thursday would create temporary pesticide-free zones when certain plants are in bloom around bees that are trucked from farm to farm by professional beekeepers, which are the majority of honeybees in the U.S. The pesticide halt would only happen during the time the flower is in bloom and the bees are there, and only on the property where the bees are working, not neighboring land.

The rule applies to virtually all insecticides, more than 1,000 products involving 76 different chemical compounds, said Jim Jones, EPA's assistant administrator for chemical safety and pollution prevention. It involves nearly all pesticides, including the much-debated class of pesticides called neonicotinoids, he said.

The idea is "to create greater space between chemicals that are toxic to bees and the bees," Jones told The Associated Press.

FULL story at link.



Volunteers check honey bee hives for queen activity and perform routine maintenance as part of a collaboration between the Cincinnati Zoo and TwoHoneys Bee Co., Wednesday, May 27, 2015, at EcOhio Farm in Mason, Ohio. A federal rule to be proposed Thursday, May 28, would create temporary pesticide-free zones when certain plants are in bloom around bees that are trucked from farm to farm by professional beekeepers, which are the majority of honeybees in the U.S. (AP Photo/John Minchillo)

Read more: http://apnews.excite.com/article/20150528/us-sci--bee_pesticides-2bb485cfcb.html

[dmosh42]

1. So when these "certain plants" are not blooming, what do the bees eat? More dumbness to....

satisfy Monsanto & gang.

[cstanleytech]

2. Umm bees eat honey which is in the nest so they can eat just fine without flowers blooming and

besides this is about the mobile bee stations which are trucked from farm to farm they dont stay there.
That aside I think its an interesting idea but a better one would be to ban certain pesticides altogether both on their usage and in the importation of any crops if they are used on them in other countries so as to discourage other countries from using the pesticides as well.

[dmosh42]

6. Oh, so the honey 'magically' appears at the hive? And this is only to protect the 'commercial' bees.

and the heck with the bees natural to that environment?

[cstanleytech]

8. Bees gather the nectar from flowers however these bees that are under discussion

are having there entire hives moved from farm to farm as each crop begins to flower.
This proposal that they are making is probably not going to work well though imo because bees don't obey human boundaries thus there is still a problem imo if the neighboring farmer is using a pesticide's when a hives been moved in to pollinate a crop.

[Novara]

3. Hey, anything is better than nothing

Pesticides are killing bees.

This is a start. Even so, I'm sure Congress will object mightily.

[Dont call me Shirley]

4. Let's phase out ALL pesticides while researching SAFE alternatives.

[Duppers]

12. +100

[valerief]

5. I don't understand. The EPA is doing EPAish stuff now? I thought they only existed now to

support BigAgra and fracking.

[logosoco]

7. Maybe this is a good step in the right direction.

Maybe we can remember which way we are supposed to go, and not the way the money tell us to.
It seems like it if it is bad for bees, it probably isn't good for people or plants. I have not researched this, but it makes sense to me! I know there are a lot of people on earth to feed, but if we are harming them in the process it doesn't make sense.

[Peace Patriot]

9. The trouble with Nature is that it is natural.

It operates on principles of "chaos" that we can barely fathom. So, when you tell bees to suck nectar only from plants within a certain area, they laugh at you. Released from their truck and their human overseer, they yell, "Wheeeeee! Freeeeedom! Go-o-o-o!" And they take off, in their free and breezy way, and go anywhere they damn please.

Cuz that's how they've survived all these millions of years, to produce the wondrous worker bees of today: random foraging. If one plant is sparse, they find another. If one plant goes extinct, they adapt and find another. "Chaos" principles are built into their DNA as a survival and prosperity mechanism. And we can no more understand "Chaos" in trying to control bees than we can understand "Chaos" in trying to control the weather.

THAT is the problem. You have to laugh, and cry, at the EPA solution--restricting these vile pesticides within certain property lines, as if bees will obey their rules. Don't get me wrong. That's better than nothing. But it also could be worse than nothing, in that it lulls stupid humans into thinking that this will solve the problem of malevolent, out-of-control corporations murdering Nature.

It's not a bad thing to reduce bee exposure to toxins that destroy their brains (that's what's going on--these toxins eat into their brain cells--rather like Alzheimer's--and they lose their navigational knowledge and skills, and can't find their way back to the hive). But there is a much bigger problem here, as is obvious. These and similar toxins have become endemic in U.S. agricultural areas and also in your local neighborhood gardens and yards. And a few people are hugely profiting from, a) sales of the toxins, and b) actively, viciously warring against better agricultural practices and better notions of Nature.

Colombia--Colombia!--just banned Roundup, which was being aerial sprayed on coca farms, and on the coca farmers and their children, animals and food crops, as part of the corrupt, murderous, failed U.S. "war on drugs," and at huge profit to its maker, Monsanto. This was part of a bigger, overarching program to brutally drive 5 million peasant farmers from their lands, as prep for U.S. "free trade for the rich." Toxins have many uses. Now they ban it. But it should never have been permitted in the first place. What the hell is wrong with us, that we allowed our tax money to be used in this way, to destroy other peoples' lives and enrich Monsanto?

One of the main reasons that Colombia banned Roundup is the cancer rate among sprayed farmers. Colombia has a U.S. "free trade for the rich'-friendly government, so you know that this was a pretty nasty business--poor farmers getting sprayed throughout the previous, fascist regime--to get any U.S. product banned.

What are these toxins doing to PEOPLE?--is one of the questions that needs to be asked and answered definitively before their use is permitted anywhere. That's one way that Monsanto & brethren are viciously warring against better practices--by using their vast influence to defund scientific studies that might find their products harmful, or that might put their products into the "precautionary principle" category (too much risk indicated; definitive studies needed).

We need to be wary of easy "fixes" with regard to the VAST disruption of Nature that humans have wrought over the last hundred years or so. Short of catastrophe, there seems to be no going back to simpler agricultural times, wherein people pulled weeds by hand, and produced excellent organic foods, traded locally. But there is rather a lot of evidence that we ARE looking at catastrophe. The bee die-offs are just one symptom of a planetary ecosystem that is in very big trouble, indeed, from our own actions (including extraction and use of fossil fuels, vast deforestation, and vast pollution of oceans, fresh water streams, soils and air with man-made toxins and trash). Can WE adapt in time to save the Earth upon which we evolved, and which has nurtured us all this time? Possibly. But it's going to take a rebirth of democracy, here--the spawning ground for most of these giant, malicious corporations--and elsewhere.

For the rebirth of democracy here, see (first of all): http://www.democraticunderground.com/1017268155

[fasttense]

10. Exactly, as if those bees (even if they are trucked in) will pay close attention to property lines

I don't raise bees, nor truck them in. Yet all my plants are pollinated by bees. Thanks neighbors

But then I also have a neighbor who thinks all things chemical were designed to be sprayed by her 10 year old son all over her lawn. That's why some of my neighbors lose over half their hives every year.

[SunSeeker]

11. Colony collapse started with the use of systemic pesticides--not spraying.

Sure, stopping spraying will help, but the bigger killer is systemic pesticides applied to seeds that become part of the plant and end up in the nectar and in the pollen of the flower. And us. And the bees.

The 2009 documentary "Vanishing of the Bees" does a really good job of laying this out. Based on what I see in that documentary, we should replace systemic pesticides with spraying.