2430. Millions of Bees Dead After South Carolina Sprays for Zika Mosquitoes

By Ben Guarino, The Washington Post, September 1, 2016

Collateral damage or another deadly policy? 

On Sunday morning, the South Carolina honey bees began to die in massive numbers.

Death came suddenly to Dorchester County, S.C. Stressed insects tried to flee their nests, only to surrender in little clumps at hive entrances. The dead worker bees littering the farms suggested that colony collapse disorder was not the culprit — in that odd phenomenon, workers vanish as though raptured, leaving a living queen and young bees behind.

Instead, the dead heaps signaled the killer was less mysterious, but no less devastating. The pattern matched acute pesticide poisoning. By one estimate, at a single apiary — Flowertown Bee Farm and Supply, in Summerville — 46 hives died on the spot, totaling about 2.5 million bees.

Walking through the farm, one Summerville woman wrote on Facebook, was “like visiting a cemetery, pure sadness.”

A Clemson University scientist collected soil samples from Flowertown on Tuesday, according to WCBD-TV, to further investigate the cause of death. But to the bee farmers, the reason is already clear. Their bees had been poisoned by Dorchester’s own insecticide efforts, casualties in the war on disease-carrying mosquitoes.

On Sunday morning, parts of Dorchester County were sprayed with Naled, a common insecticide that kills mosquitoes on contact. The United States began using Naled in 1959, according to the Environmental Protection Agency, which notes that the chemical dissipates so quickly it is not a hazard to people. That said, human exposure to Naled during spraying “should not occur.”

In parts of South Carolina, trucks trailing pesticide clouds are not an unusual sight, thanks to a mosquito-control program that also includes destroying larvae. Given the current concerns of West Nile virus and Zika — there are several dozen cases of travel-related Zika in South Carolina, though the state health department reports no one has yet acquired the disease from a local mosquito bite — Dorchester decided to try something different Sunday.

It marked a departure from Dorchester County’s usual ground-based efforts. For the first time, an airplane dispensed Naled in a fine mist, raining insect death from above between 6:30 a.m. and 8:30 a.m. Sunday. The county says it provided plenty of warning, spreading word about the pesticide plane via a newspaper announcement Friday and a Facebook post Saturday.

Local beekeepers felt differently.

“Had I known, I would have been camping on the steps doing whatever I had to do screaming, ‘No you can’t do this,'” beekeeper Juanita Stanley said in an interview with Charleston’s WCSC-TV. Stanley told the Charleston Post and Courier that the bees are her income, but she is more devastated by the loss of the bees than her honey.

The county acknowledged the bee deaths Tuesday. “Dorchester County is aware that some beekeepers in the area that was sprayed on Sunday lost their beehives,” Jason Ward, county administrator, said in a news release. He added, according to the Charleston Post and Courier, “I am not pleased that so many bees were killed.”

Spraying Naled from the air is not unprecedented, particularly when covering areas that cannot be reached by truck. In a single year in Florida, more than 6 million acres were fumigated with the chemical, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The agency argued in January that the technique should be used to curb Zika in Puerto Rico.

But the insect neurotoxin cannot discriminate between honey bees and bloodsuckers. A profile of the chemical in Cornell University’s pesticide database warned that “Naled is highly toxic to bees.”

Although the insecticide was known to kill bees, to South Carolina beekeepers spraying had not been as significant a concern as parasites, disease and other hive threats. As South Carolina Beekeepers Association President Larry Haigh told the Post and Courier in June 2015, many counties will spray at night, when honey bees do not forage for pollen. Plus, given sufficient warning, beekeepers will shield their hives and protect the bees’ food and water from contamination.

Sunday was different. Summerville resident Andrew Macke, who keeps bees as a hobby, wrote on Facebook that the hot weather left bees particularly exposed. Once temperatures exceed 90 degrees, bees may exit the nest to cool down in what is called a beard, clustering on the outside of the hive in a ball. Neither Macke nor Stanley had covered their hives.

And then came the plane.

“They passed right over the trees three times,” Stanley said to ABC 4 News. After the plane left, the familiar buzzing stopped. The silence in its wake was like a morgue, she said.

As for the dead bees, as Stanley told the AP, her farm “looks like it’s been nuked.”

A Summerville resident started a Change.org petition calling for Dorchester County to halt aerial Naled spraying. It is unclear whether those who lost bees are pursuing other recourse.

Update: Dorchester County administrator Jason Ward wrote to The Washington Post in a statement on Thursday, clarifying that the county sent out a press release at 9:15 a.m. on Friday, Aug. 26.

“The beekeepers that were on the county’s contact list that were in the zone to be sprayed were called with one exception. Mr. Scott Gaskins, who runs the Mosquito Control program, failed to call Mitch Yawn, Ms. Juanita Stanley’s business partner,” Ward said in the email.

“The second issue regarding beekeepers like Mr. Andrew Macke revolves around the fact that the county did not have these locations on its list. However, we have reached out to the Lowcountry Beekeepers Association and they provided us with the names and locations for other beekeepers in Dorchester County.”

2284. Scientists Consider the Idea That Honeybees Can Feel

By James Gorman, The New York Times, April 18, 2016

Honeybee brain

Bees find nectar and tell their hive-mates; flies evade the swatter; and cockroaches seem to do whatever they like wherever they like. But who would believe that insects are conscious, that they are aware of what’s going on, not just little biobots?

Neuroscientists and philosophers apparently. As scientists lean increasingly toward recognizing that nonhuman animals are conscious in one way or another, the question becomes: Where does consciousness end?

Andrew B. Barron, a cognitive scientist, and Colin Klein, a philosopher, at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia, propose in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that insects have the capacity for consciousness.

This does not mean that a honeybee thinks, “Why am I not the queen?” or even, “Oh, I like that nectar.” But, Dr. Barron and Dr. Klein wrote in a scientific essay, the honeybee has the capacity to feel something.

Their claim stops short of some others. Christof Koch, the president and chief scientific officer of the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle, and Giulio Tononi, a neuroscientist and psychiatrist at the University of Wisconsin, have proposed that consciousness is nearly ubiquitous in different degrees, and can be present even in nonliving arrangements of matter, to varying degrees.

They say that rather than wonder how consciousness arises, one should look at where we know it exists and go from there to where else it might exist.

They conclude that it is an inherent property of physical systems in which information moves around in a certain way — and that could include some kinds of artificial intelligence and even naturally occurring nonliving matter.

At the most basic level, consciousness is awareness, Dr. Barron and Dr. Klein say. A robot vacuum moves around and responds to information from the external world — when it is stopped by a wall, for instance. But the vacuum doesn’t have any experience, Dr. Klein says — it doesn’t feel like anything to be a Roomba.

He and Dr. Barron propose that it may well feel like something to be a honeybee, or another insect, although what that feeling is, no one knows.

They make their case this way:

• Other scientists have argued that a part of the human brain called the midbrain can, on its own, give a person lacking more advanced parts of the brain simple awareness.
• The insect brain does something similar to the midbrain in absorbing information from the environment, from memory and from the body to organize its activity.
• If the insect brain does the same job as the vertebrate midbrain, then the insect has the capacity for awareness.

If the insect brain does the same job as the vertebrate midbrain, then the insect has the capacity for awareness.

If this line of reasoning is correct, Dr. Barron and Dr. Klein say, a robot built with artificial intelligence that could integrate sensory data, memory and body awareness would have the capacity for the minimal level of consciousness they describe.

By the same token, plants do not have any structures that would allow for awareness, says Dr. Barron, nor does a simple animal like C. elegans, the roundworm used in so many experiments. It has 302 neurons. A honeybee, by contrast, has almost a million.

Dr. Koch said in an email that he thought Dr. Barron and Dr. Klein were making a reasonable argument. The brains of bees and flies, he wrote, “possess intricate circuitry an order of magnitude denser than the circuits of the celebrated neocortex,” which is central to human thinking.

Peter Godfrey-Smith, a philosopher at the City University of New York who writes about consciousness, said in an email that he found the argument by Dr. Barron and Dr. Klein plausible. But, he said, there could be many different kinds of awareness and insects might be aware of motion, for example, but “were not good candidates for feeling pain,” unlike octopuses and crabs.

“Insects might have subjective experience,” he wrote, “but not of a kind that has a lot of ethical consequences.”

Dr. Barron emphasized that the article was intended simply to propose a hypothesis rather than offer a proven conclusion. “We put it forward because we think we should have this debate,” he said.

2198. A Deadly Honeybee Virus Spread by Commodification of Bees

By Sindya N. Bhanoo, The New York Times, February 8, 2016

A honeybee with pollen on its leg. Photo: Jef Meul, Minden Pictures. 

The deformed wing virus is decimating bee populations worldwide, and it is spreading because of human trade and the transport of bees, a new study reports.

“It’s largely a man-made problem,” said Lena Wilfert, an evolutionary geneticist at the University of Exeter and an author of the report.

Dr. Wilfert and her colleagues analyzed genetic data from honeybees and Varroa mites, which infect the bees with the virus and feed on their larvae. After gathering samples from 32 locations and 17 countries, they traced the major routes by which the virus spread.

The researchers found that the virus, which originated in Asian bee populations, first spread to Eastern and Western Europe, and then moved to North America, Australia and New Zealand.

“It was driven by the trade and movement of honeybee colonies,” Dr. Wilfert said. According to her study, which appears in the journal Science, the virus is spreading largely because of the transport of European honeybees.

On its own, deformed wing virus does not seem to be a major threat to hives. The infection typically results in deformed wings and other developmental abnormalities in infected bees. When a hive also has Varroa mites, however, the combination is deadly: The mites eat larvae and infect high numbers of bees with the virus.

“We rely on pollinators both for crops and for biodiversity,” Dr. Wilfert said. “We need to consider our impact not on just honeybees but so many other pollinators that have no one to take care of them.”