'Buzzfeed' Pesticides Giving Bees the Fatal High
Two studies have buttressed earlier findings that bees get a high on certain pesticides and come back for more, jeopardizing healthy of colonies and of ecosystems they constitute.
Conducted by researchers at UK's Newcastle University and Sweden's Lund University, the studies have respectively shown that bees prefer to feed on nectar laced with neonicotinoids, a class of pesticides that reproduce the effects of smoking in bees. The Newcastle study showed that both honeybees and bumblebees cannot taste neonicotinoid pesticides, though they exhibit preference for it.
"Bees can't taste neonicotinoids in their food and therefore do not avoid these pesticides. Even worse, we now have evidence that bees prefer to eat pesticide-contaminated food. Neonicotinoids target the same mechanisms in the bee brain that are affected by nicotine in the human brain. The fact that bees show a preference for food containing neonicotinoids is concerning as it suggests that like nicotine, neonicotinoids may act like a drug to make foods containing these substances more rewarding," said Professor Geraldine Wright, the lead author of the study based on lab experiments.
Swedish researchers found that neonicotinoids affected entire colonies of wild bees in the field.
"We saw a clear negative impact on growth and ability to reproduce in bumblebee colonies near treated rapeseed fields," said Maj Rundlöf from Lund University, the study's principal investigator while adding that they were testing new methods of tackling flea beetles which warrant use of pesticides.
