Humanity’s chemical SUICIDE confirmed: Pesticides sprayed on food crops are wiping out food pollinators, leading toward a global food collapse
by: Tracey Watson
NaturalNews.com
Tuesday, July 18, 2017
The next time you sit down to a delicious meal, consider the fact that bees are responsible for every third bite you eat. Honey bees take care of about 80 percent of all pollination, with just one bee colony pollinating upwards of 300 million flowers in a single day. In fact, 70 percent of the world’s most important food crops are totally dependent on pollination by bees. And yet, Greenpeace reports that in the United States, “the number of bee colonies per hectare has declined by 90 percent since 1962.”
While it is normal for a bee colony to lose between five and 10 percent of its members each winter, in recent years these declines have averaged between 30 and 50 percent; some farmers have reported 90 percent die-offs in a single year. Though Big Agri companies like Monsanto, DuPont and Syngenta have done their best to avert blame, one of the biggest contributors to the honey bee crisis is the use of neonicotinoid pesticides they produce, as was recently confirmed by a study published in the journal Science.
Researchers from York University and Université Laval in Canada investigated the effects of these harmful pesticides on honey bee populations by studying colonies naturally exposed to neonicotinoids during their active season.
Their conclusion?
“Realistic experiments showed that neonicotinoids increased worker mortality and were associated with declines in social immunity and increased queenlessness over time. We also discovered that the acute toxicity of neonicotinoids to honey bees doubles in the presence of a commonly encountered fungicide. Our work demonstrates that field-realistic exposure to neonicotinoids can reduce honey bee health in corn-growing regions.”
So, what exactly are these harmful chemicals? Neonicotinoids – or neonics, as they are commonly known – are the most widely used pesticides in conventional farming. They ward off insects by affecting their central nervous systems, causing paralysis and death. Neonics are sprayed on seeds or directly on crops, where they are taken right up into the plants’ flowers, leaves, roots, stems, pollen and nectar. This poses an obvious danger to pollinators like bees and butterflies.
The Center for Food Safety reports that there is a direct correlation between the use of neonics and the decline in honey bee populations. In fact, states with the most widespread use of neonics, including Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas and Missouri, have also experienced the most dramatic declines in honey bee populations.
Bees exposed to neonics have exhibited learning problems, fertility problems, trouble with memory, difficulty foraging and impaired motor activity.
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