Honey Bees Have Vanished: Are We Next? | Event Registration

This March, the topic of pesticide spraying on rapeseed causing losses to beekeepers sparked discussion. Beekeepers saw honey bees dying in swathes, and people also began to pay attention to the impact of pesticides on pollinators. But beyond the visible deaths, there is a more insidious disappearance: the honey bees are not dying inside the hives; instead, entire bee colonies vanish, leaving only empty hives behind.

Through their research, Harvard University professor Lü Chensheng and his research colleagues found that sustained ingestion of low doses of neonicotinoid insecticides affects the mitochondrial health of honey bees and ultimately leads to the disappearance of bee colonies. This phenomenon was later named colony collapse disorder (CCD).

◉ Inspecting an experimental bee hive during overwintering. Photograph: Richard Kalahan

Moreover, pesticides do not remain outside the hives, so the honey bees are not the only ones affected.

With the widespread use of seed coating technology, systemic pesticides enter plants at the seed stage and, as crops grow, pass into soil, water, pollen and air, affecting insects of all sizes in the food chain and eventually reaching human dining tables and entering the human body. When Professor Lü Chensheng carried out testing in China, he also found traces of neonicotinoid insecticides in water sources, soil, common fruit and vegetables, and even in the blood of pregnant women.

When a pesticide can pass from seed to plant, from plant to environment, and from environment to table, its ultimate impact is not only on agricultural production but also on land, food and health.

◉ Maize seed coated with neonicotinoid insecticides. Photograph: Lü Chensheng

Seed companies, Monsanto among them, have strengthened control over agricultural production by tying pesticides to seeds, and have also created ecological and health risks. Yet regulation in this area remains inadequate, and policy leans towards agricultural capital. Why do governments not carry out a full assessment before new pesticides are used on a large scale, including an assessment of their impact on all organisms in the ecosystem and on humans themselves?

Honey bees and humans share the same environmental system. The problems honey bees have exposed early on may also be problems humans will sooner or later have to face. Professor Lü Chensheng has turned the experimental process and his subsequent reflections into a popular science book, The Vanishing Honey Bees, hoping that, through the disappearance of honey bees, he can remind humans to better balance the benefits and drawbacks of pesticide use.

At 2 pm on Sunday 31 May, at the DT51 RDV Bookstore in Beijing, Foodthink invites Professor Lü Chensheng, author of The Vanishing Honey Bees, to join us in discussing, beginning with honey bees, the ecological and health problems caused by the large-scale use of pesticides; and how seed companies influence agricultural policy and regulation, in order to rethink the relationship between food, people and the environment in modern agriculture.

Lü Chensheng | He is currently a Distinguished Professor and doctoral supervisor in the School of Resources and Environment at Southwest University, a specially appointed expert in Chongqing, and a Visiting Professor in the School of Public Health at Washington University in the United States. Before returning to China to work full time in 2018, he had served as a Professor in the School of Public Health at Harvard University in the United States and an Associate Professor in the School of Public Health at Emory University in the United States. His main research areas include pesticide exposure in human populations and health risk assessment, research on the safety and survival of pollinators under environmental stress, and the development, detection and application of biomarkers for the transgenerational inheritance of toxicity.

Tianle | Founding editor of Foodthink and convener of the Beijing Organic Farmers’ Market.

▼

Click the image to read related articles