Honeybees and a Tale of Two Companies: Mann Lake vs. Monsanto

 Honey bees, crucial in the pollination of many U.S. food crops, continue to die off at an alarming rate.  Total losses of managed honey bee colonies was 23.2 percent nationwide for the 2013-2014 winter, according to the annual report issued by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the "Bee Informed Partnership," a group of honeybee industry participants.

The death rate for the most recent winter, October 2013 through April 2014, follows a 30.5 percent loss reported for the winter of 2012-2013, and a 21.9 percent loss in 2011-2012.  At this rate, bee populations have been dying at a rate the U.S. government says is economically unsustainable. Honey bees pollinate plants that produce about a quarter of the food consumed by Americans, including apples, almonds, watermelons and beans, according to government reports.
Scientists, consumer groups and bee keepers say the devastating rate of bee deaths is due at least in part to the growing use of pesticides sold by agrichemical companies to boost yields of staple crops such as corn.  On May 9 the Harvard School of Public Health released a study that found that two widely used neonicotinoids — a class of insecticide — appear to have significantly harmed honey bee colonies over their winter dormant period. 

"With the damning evidence mounting, pesticide companies can no longer spin their way out of this crisis," said Michele Simon, a public health lawyer who specializes in food issues. 

The guilty parties? Monsanto Co (whose executives have close ties with both the Obama Administration and with Bill and Hillary Clinton) and DuPont,  both of whom are responsible for producing the majority of the defoliant Agent Orange which affected generations of Americans during the post-Vietnam war years.   

Last year, organic farmers were outraged to discover that the Illinois Department of Agriculture had actually seized and destroyed healthy bee colonies belonging to a scientist who spent 15 years developing a strain that was resistant to the toxic effect of Monsanto’s chemical Roundup.

Meanwhile, the entire European Union has enacted an outright ban on the use of neonicotinoids on crops, home lawns, and gardens

But in the small town of Hackensack, Minnesota, a small company named Mann Lake Limited   stands as David against Goliath.

The company was started by Betty and Jack Thomas, who were hobby beekeepers 30 years ago. But as bees and supplies grew scarce, they took matters into their own hands.  

“Let’s start a little bee keeping supply business as a cottage industry out at the lake,” Jack said.

It wasn’t long before business boomed. They now employ 350 people, making their business larger than the town in which they are located. Those 350 employees make everything from the hives to the food bees eat in the off season. They supply beekeepers large and small, from Minnesota to the Middle East, and have recently opened a new facility in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania.

“When you are a hobby beekeeper you start out with the equipment which we make,” Jack said. “Now you need bees to put in that equipment.”  And so, millions of bees arrive at Mann Lake Limited in early May, after a 30-hour nonstop run from California, where the new bees are bred. They come in 2,000 wooden crates, stacked onto pallets.  Each box holds a queen, and 15,000 worker bees.

Nationwide, the problems that both commercial and hobby beekeepers have is keeping their bees alive and away from the pesticides that appear to be annihilating them. 

“Always in the back of the mind is: What else can we do?” Jack said. “Where can we expand? What new products can we come up with?”

It’s all to give bees a fighting chance. 

Betty and Jack, like some other socially responsible businesses such as Juan Valdez Coffee and New Belgium Brewing,  have since turned their business over to their employees through an employee stock ownership plan.  In essence, their business’ “worker bees” are also now the owners “the colony,” and all share a vision to prevent a catastrophic collapse of the nation’s food supply.

One can only hope that as in the biblical story, David defeats the mighty Goliath.

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Monsanto Insecticides Linked to Honeybee Colony Collapse

Honeybees – critical agents for pollinizing the world’s food chain – have been dying off at rates of 20-50% a year for the last two decades. The phenomenon, called “Colony Collapse Disorder,” has been blamed on mites, viruses, urbanization, weather patterns, and a whole host of causes. But the reality is that the massive deaths of these insects is most likely due to a chemical whose prime purpose…is to kill insects.

In Thursday’s issue of the journal “Science,” two teams of researchers published studies showing that even low levels of a group of pesticides called neonicotinoids may have significant effects on bee colonies. Derived from nicotine, the pesticides are produced in mass quantities by Monsanto, the company that gave you Agent Orange, GMO lawsuits against family farms, and the Indian suicides crisis. Introduced in the early 1990s, these pesticides have exploded in popularity; virtually all corn grown in the United States is treated with neonicotinoids.

The first experiment was conducted by French researchers, and showed that the chemicals confuse honeybee homing instincts, making it harder for them to find their way back to their hives. Researchers at the National Institute for Agricultural Research in France fed honeybees a dose of neonicotinoid-laced sugar water and then moved them a half-mile from their hive. The bees carried miniature radio tags that allowed the scientists to keep track of how many returned to the hive.

In familiar territory, the scientists found, the bees exposed to the pesticide were 10 percent less likely than healthy bees to make it home; in unfamiliar places, that figure rose to 31 percent. Using a computer model to estimate how this would affect a hive, they concluded that a hive’s population might drop by two-thirds or more.

“I thought it was very well designed,” said May Berenbaum, an entomologist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

The second study, by scientists in Britain, showed that neonicocotinoids keep bumblebees from supplying their hives with enough food to produce new queens. In this study, Dr. Goulson and his colleagues fed sugar water laced with a neonicotinoid pesticide to 50 bumblebee colonies. The researchers then moved the bee colonies to a farm, alongside 25 colonies that had been fed ordinary sugar water. Dr. Goulson found that colonies exposed to neonicotinoids produced 85 percent fewer queens, which would translate into 85 percent fewer hives.

Jeffery Pettis, a bee expert at the United States Department of Agriculture, called Dr. Goulson’s study “alarming.” He said he suspected that other types of wild bees would be shown to suffer similar effects.
“Three or four years ago, I was much more cautious about how much pesticides were contributing to the problem,” Dr. Pettis said. “Now more and more evidence points to pesticides being a consistent part of the problem.”


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