Few
ecological disasters have been as confounding as the massive and
devastating die-off of the world's honeybees. The phenomenon of
Colony
Collapse Disorder (CCD) -- in which disoriented honeybees die
far from
their hives -- has kept scientists, beekeepers, and regulators
desperately seeking the cause. After all, the honeybee, nature's
ultimate utility player, pollinates a third of all the food we
eat and
contributes an estimated $15 billion in annual agriculture
revenue to
the U.S. economy.
The long list of
possible suspects has included pests, viruses, fungi, and also
pesticides, particularly so-called neonicotinoids, a class of
neurotoxins that kills insects by attacking their nervous
systems. For
years, their leading manufacturer, Bayer Crop Science, a
subsidiary of
the German pharmaceutical giant Bayer AG (BAYRY), has tangled with regulators and
fended
off lawsuits from angry beekeepers who allege that the
pesticides have
disoriented and ultimately killed their bees. The company has
countered that, when used correctly, the pesticides pose little
risk.
A cheer must have gone up at Bayer on Thursday when a front-page New York
Times
article,
under
the headline "Scientists and Soldiers Solve a Bee Mystery,"
described how a newly released study pinpoints a different cause
for
the die-off: "a fungus tag-teaming with a virus." The study,
written in collaboration with Army scientists at the Edgewood
Chemical
Biological Center outside Baltimore, analyzed the proteins of
afflicted bees using a new Army software system. The Bayer
pesticides,
however, go unmentioned.
What the
Times article did not explore -- nor did the study
disclose -- was
the relationship between the study's lead author, Montana bee
researcher Dr. Jerry Bromenshenk, and Bayer Crop Science. In
recent
years Bromenshenk has received a significant research grant from
Bayer
to study bee pollination. Indeed, before receiving the Bayer
funding,
Bromenshenk was lined up on the opposite side: He had signed on
to
serve as an expert witness for beekeepers who brought a
class-action
lawsuit against Bayer in 2003. He then dropped out and received
the
grant.
Reporter:
scientist "did not volunteer" funding sources
Bromenshenk's
company, Bee Alert Technology, which is developing hand-held
acoustic
scanners that use sound to detect various bee ailments, will
profit
more from a finding that disease, and not pesticides, is harming
bees.
Two years ago Bromenshenk acknowledged as much to me when I was
reporting on the possible neonicotinoid/CCD connection for
Conde
Nast Portfolio magazine, which folded before I completed
my
reporting.
Bromenshenk
defends
the study and emphasized that it did not examine the impact of
pesticides. "It wasn't on the table because others are funded to
do that," he says, noting that no Bayer funds were used on the
new study. Bromenshenk vociferously denies that receiving
funding from
Bayer (to study bee pollination of onions) had anything to do
with his
decision to withdraw from the plaintiff's side in the litigation
against Bayer. "We got no money from Bayer," he says.
"We did no work for Bayer; Bayer was sending us warning letters
by lawyers."
A Bayer publicist
reached last night said she was not authorized to comment on the
topic
but was trying to reach an official company spokesperson.
The Times
reporter who authored the recent article, Kirk Johnson,
responded in
an e-mail that Dr. Bromenshenk "did not volunteer his funding
sources." Johnson's e-mail notes that he found the peer-reviewed
scientific paper cautious and that he "tried to convey that
caution in my story." Adds Johnson: The study "doesn't say
pesticides aren't a cause of the underlying vulnerability that
the
virus-fungus combo then exploits...."
At least one
scientist questions the new study. Dr. James Frazier, professor
of
entomology at Penn State University, who is currently
researching the
sublethal impact of pesticides on bees, said that while
Bromenshenk's
study generated some useful data, Bromenshenk has a conflict of
interest as CEO of a company developing scanners to diagnose bee
diseases. "He could benefit financially from that if this thing
gets popularized," Frazier says, "so it's a difficult
situation to deal with." He adds that his own research has shown
that pesticides affect bees "absolutely, in multiple
ways."
Underlying
cause
of bee deaths still unclear
Dr. Jennifer Sass,
a
senior scientist with the health group at the Natural Resources
Defense Council, says that while the Bromenshenk/Army study is
interesting, it fails to ask the underlying question "Why are
colonies dying? Is it because they're getting weak? People who
have
HIV don't die of HIV. They die of other diseases they get
because
their immune systems are knocked off, making them more
susceptible."
In other words, pesticides could weaken the bees -- and then the
virus/fungus combination finishes them off. That notion,
however, is
not explored in the new study.
In 2008 the NRDC
sued the Environmental Protection Agency after it failed to
release
Bayer's underlying studies on the safety of its neonicotinoids.
The
federal agency has since changed course, and NRDC researchers
are
being allowed to sift through the Bayer studies, an NRDC
spokesman
says.
The EPA has based
its approval of neonicotinoids on the fact that the amounts
found in
pollen and nectar were low enough to not be lethal to the bees
-- the
only metric they have to measure whether to approve a pesticide
or
not. But studies have shown that at low doses, the
neonicotinoids have
sublethal effects that impair bees' learning and memory. The
USDA's
chief researcher, Jeff Pettis, told me in 2008 that pesticides
were
definitely "on the list" as a primary stressor that could
make bees more vulnerable to other factors, like pests and
bacteria.
In 1999, France
banned Imidacloprid after the death of a third of its honeybees.
A
subsequent report prepared for the French agricultural ministry
found
that even tiny sublethal amounts could disorient bees, diminish
their
foraging activities, and thus endanger the entire colony. Other
countries, including Italy, have banned certain
neonicotinoids.
Bayer v.
beekeepers
As for the
Bayer-Bromenshenk connection, in 2003 a group of 13 North Dakota
beekeepers brought a class-action lawsuit against Bayer,
alleging that
the company's neonicotinoid, Imidacloprid, which had been used
in
nearby fields, was responsible for the loss of more than 60% of
their
hives. "My bees were getting drunk," Chris Charles, a
beekeeper in Carrington, N.D., and a plaintiff in the lawsuit,
told me
in 2008. "They couldn't walk a white line anymore -- they just
hung around outside the hive. They couldn't work."
Charles and the
other North Dakota beekeepers hired Bromenshenk as an expert
witness.
Bayer did not dispute that Imidacloprid was found among the bees
and
their hives. The company simply argued that the amount had not
been
enough to kill them.
As the North
Dakota
lawsuit moved forward, an expert witness for the beekeepers, Dr.
Daniel Mayer, a now retired bee expert from Washington State
University, traveled to 17 different bee yards in North Dakota
and
observed dead bees and bees in the throes of what looked like
Imidacloprid poisoning, he told me in 2008. He theorized that
after
foraging in planted fields where the seeds had been treated with
Imidacloprid, the bees then brought the pesticide back to the
hive,
where it built up in the wax combs.
The beekeepers
tried
to enlist more expert witnesses, but others declined, according
to two
of the beekeeper plaintiffs, in large part because they had
taken
research money from Bayer and did not want to testify against
the
company. One who agreed -- Bromenshenk -- subsequently backed
out and
got a research grant from Bayer. Bromenshenk insists the two
actions
were unrelated. "It was a personal decision," he says.
"I, in good conscience, couldn't charge beekeepers for services
when I couldn't help them." He adds, "Eventually, the
lawyers stopped calling. I didn't quit. They just stopped
calling."
In June 2008 a
district court judge in Pennsylvania defanged the beekeepers'
lawsuit
by siding with Bayer to exclude Mayer's testimony and the
initial test
results from a laboratory in Jacksonville, Fla., that had found
significant amounts of Imidacloprid in the honeybee
samples.
That same year
Bromenshenk brokered a meeting between Bayer and beekeepers.
When I
interviewed Bromenshenk that year, he said that increasing
frustration
with the accusations against Bayer, which he described as a
"runaway train," led him to contact the company in an effort
to create a dialogue between Bayer and the beekeepers. Because
of his
efforts, in November 2008, Bayer scientists sat down in Lake
Tahoe,
Nev., with a small group of American beekeepers to establish a
dialogue. The issues discussed were "trust and transparency,"
Bromenshenk told me. "How did Bayer do its testing, and do we
trust the results?" Generally beekeepers and scientists have
been
highly critical of the design of Bayer's studies and deeply
suspicious
over who is or isn't on Bayer's payroll.
After the meeting,
Bayer tentatively agreed to appoint a beekeeper advisory board
to help
redesign studies so that beekeepers could trust the results. But
many
beekeepers see the advisory board and grant money as a ruse on
Bayer's
part to silence its enemies by holding them close. "They have
the
bee industry so un-united," says Jim Doan, once New York State's
busiest beekeeper until CCD decimated his business. "Even the
researchers are off working on anything but the pesticide
issue."
Bromenshenk's
study
acknowledges that the research does not "clearly define"
whether the concurrent virus and fungus, which were found in all
the
afflicted bee samples, is "a marker, a cause, or a consequence
of
CCD." It also notes uncertainty as to how, exactly, the
combination kills the bees, and whether other factors like
weather and
bee digestion play a role. Scientists like Sass at NRDC believe
the
mystery is far from resolved: "We're even concerned that based
on
this, beekeepers will use more pesticides trying to treat these
viruses," says Sass.