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www.independent.academia.edu/nijaz.deleutwww.linkedin.com/in/kemodeleutnijaz

E-mail: deleutsenviro@gmail.com; o3makesfree@aol.com

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SAVE OUR BEES - Project proposal by Nijaz Deleut Kemo, FCD

Decisive step in safequarding Europe's pollinatorsDid you know that three quarters of the world's food crops and 90% of wild plants depend on pollination to thrive?

If insects like bees, whose population is declining because of various environmental stressors, were to disappear, the damage in terms of biodiversity, food security and economic growth would be immeasurable. Food production as ubiquitous as coffee and chocolate would become memories of the past, which partly explains why some of the planet's most renowned scientists have been hard at work trying to curb this trend.

Status and Trends of European Pollinators (STEP) ProjectThe STEP Project is helping to better understand the causes of pollinator declining including habitat loss, climate change, diseases, invasive alien species and pesticides. For the STEP team, taking on this challenge can only be done with sufficient information on the extent and nature of the decline, which species we need most and why, and the main drivers impacting population levels. Early results suggest that it is a combination of several of these pressures on pollinators that has resulted in the massive losses of wild bees and honeybees, explained Dr Potts, coordinator of STEP.Completed in January 2015, the STEP Project has considerably advanced our understanding of trends affecting pollinator populations in Europe, while suggesting concrete measures to help safeguard the most important species.

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The report, the latest in a series of over 50 STEP publications, expands on the likely consequences of different scenarios of global warming for the years 2050 and 2100. It underlines that as 14 and 25 species are projected to lose almost all of their climatically suitable areas, under the intermediate and most severe scenarios respectively, and that strong mitigation strategies will be needed to preserve this important species and ensure the sustainable provision of pollination services.The STEP Project has generated a substantial body of knowledge on how to conserve pollinators, safeguard the pollination of crops and better understand how to mitigate against threats. One of these solutions, would consist in covering crop land margins with a mix of flowers to attract pollinators and help them colonize new spaces. The team observed a 500% growth in pollinator abundance thanks to this initiative.Communication was also a big part of the STEP plan, with awareness campaigns having been organized in schools and supermarkets across Europe. The team also actively participated in international events and initiatives pursuing similar objectives.The STEP Project released a final brochure containing its main recommendations in January 2015. It includes a Red List of European Bees to help direct conservation efforts at the national and continental level, as well as a set of tools and methodologies to help with future monitoring and assessment of both pollinators and the services they deliver, and support planners and decision makers in managing the wider landscape.For the team, coordinated by the University of Reading in the United Kingdom, European decision makers should now focus on developing robust scientific evidence to underpin policy and practice measures aiming to safeguard our pollinators. For more on this project, please see: http://www.step-project.net/

Overview In the fall of 2006 (some beekeepers reported losses of 30-90% of their hives),a laud, new buzz began among beekeepers in a number of countries when managedhoney bee colonies began to disappear in large numbers without known reason. By February 2007, the syndrome, which characterized by the disappearance of alladult honey bees in a hive while immature bees and honey remain, had beenchristened “COLONY COLLAPSE DISORDER” (CCD).Because honey bees are critical for agricultural pollination – adding more than15 billion US dollars in value to about 130 crops – especially high-valuespecialty crops like berries, nuts, fruits, and vegetables, the unexpecteddisappearance of to many managed colonies was not a meter to take lightly.

In general, honey bee colony health has been declining since the 1980s, with theintroduction of new pathogens and pests. The spread into United States of Varroa and tracheal mites, in particular,created major new stresses on honey bees.

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At the same time, the call for hives to supply pollination services hascontinued to climb. This means honey bees colonies are trucked farther and moreoften than ever before, which also stresses the bees. The question beekeepers and scientists (our role) alike is:

“Just what is causing CCD?”Four broad classes of potential causes are studied by scientists and many othersaround the world:

1. pathogens,2. parasites,3. environmental stresses (which includes pesticides), and4. management stresses (including nutrition problems, mainly from nectar orpollen dearth).

Possibility of a multi-factorial cause is one of the problems that makesinvestigating the cause of CCD especially complex.

In 2010, CCD again devastated honey bee colonies in USA, Europe, and Asia,indicating that the problem is neither diminishing nor has it been resolved.

Many CCD investigations, using sensitive genome-based methods, have found smallRNA bee viruses and the microsporidia, Nosema apis and Nosema ceranae in healthyand collapsing colonies alike with no single pathogen firmly linked to honey beelosses.

Laboratory cage trials with a strain of IIV (invertebrate iridescent virus) type 6 and Nosema ceranae confirmed that co-infection with these two pathogens wasmore lethal to bees than either pathogen alone.

These findings implicate co-infections by IIV and Nosema (interacting withmites) with honey bee colony decline, giving credence to older research pointingto, as probable cause of bee losses in the USA, Europe, and Asia.

We next need to characterize the IIV and Nosema that we detected and developmanagement practices to reduce honey bee losses.

First of all, it's not clear yet just how the two agents work together to causesuch devastating results (that is part of the next phase of research), and

Second, it must be find out on which way environmental factors like drought and extreme cold may exacerbate this problem.

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In conclusion, other factors also may be playing a role in the collapse of bee colonies worldwide, including the use of pesticides (neonicotinoid), and the loss of flowering plants.

Recently, February 2013, scientists at the University of Sheffield, England, UK, were able to track the arrival and spread of the varroa mite, varroa destructor, on Oahu island in Hawaii.

Within a year of the blood-sucking mite's arrival in 2007, 65% of the 419 bee colonies on Oahu island were wiped out, according to the research, published in the Journal Science (2013).The following year the mites reached big island of Hawaii and devastated bee colonies there, the study said.

The Sheffield scientists said the mites spread a devastating ailment called deformed wing virus (DWV), which rapidly spread through bee colonies, killing nearly all the bees.

On April 29th, 2013, the European Commission overruled British opposition to impose a total two-year ban for gardeners on the use of pesticides linked to the death of bees, with new rules setting out tight restrictions for farmers.

British Government opposed the ban and argued that European Commission proposalslacked conclusive scientific evidence to back up restrictions that will costEurope's farmers up to 1,7 billion Eur and lead to 20% losses of key cropyields.

Following on inconclusive vote in EU Technical Committee without clear qualifiedmajority for or against, the European Commission has said it will overruledopposition to impose a ban. During the vote 15 EU countries including Germanysupported the ban, while 8 member states led by Britain voted against on a forabstained.

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Tonio Borg, the EU's Health and Consumer Commissioner said: “ Although a majority of member states now supports our proposal, the necessary qualified majority was not reached. The decision now lie with the European Commission. Since our proposal is based on a number risks to bee health, the commission will go ahead in coming weeks.”

He pledged to do his utmost to ensure that our bees, which are so vital to our ecosystem and contribute over 22 billion Eur annually to European agriculture, are protected.

The new European Union restriction will apply from December, 2013 for three (3) neonicotinoides:– clothianidin, - imidacloprid, and - thiametoxam,

which are used to treat bee-attractive crops such as rape seeds.

Friends of the Earth (FofE) welcomed the ban as a “significant victory for beesand common sense,” and attacked the UK Government for opposing the newrestrictions:

“Restricting the use of these pesticides could be an historic milestone on theroad to recovery for these critical pollinators. The UK Government's refusal toback restrictions on these chemicals, despite growing scientific concern abouttheir impact, is yet another blow to its environmental credibility.”

Dave Goulson, biologist, said that despite British reluctance, a EU ban on the neonicotinoides thought to harm bees is good news. Why ? A third of our food relies on bees for pollination. Both the US and the UK report losing a third of their bees in the year 2008.

Other European countries have seen major die-offs too: Italy, for example, in 2008, said it lost nearly half of its bees.

The idea is that neonicotinoides – a family of pesticides designed to kill crop pests such as aphids – are responsible for the worrying decline in bee number, over last decade or so – both domestic honeybees and wild pollinators such as bumblebees.Neonicotinoides are widely applied as a seed dressing to crops such as oilseed rape, and being systemic they spread through the plant into the nectar and pollen.

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They are highly toxic to insects: for example, the “LD50” - the dose that kills half of test subjects – in honeybees is about 4 billionths of gram (1 gram would provide on LD50 to 250 million honeybees, or roughly 25 metric tonnes of bee).They are neurotoxins, binding to neural receptors in the brain and causing swift paralysis and death – it seemed to affect their behavioral, particularly their ability to learn, gather food and navigate.

For more see: investigation from 2011, by Dave Goulson, published in Science, DOI:10.1126/science.11215025., on bumblebees. And so far, the evidence is convincing and coherent: exposure to levels of neonicotinoides commonly, found in crops profoundly damages colony success.

Busy as bee, pollinating flowers by hand, in China.

While debate so far has focused on bees, there are broader issues to consider.

These chemicals last in soils for a long time, and evidence has recently emerged that they accumulate over time (PLoS One, 10.1317/journal.pone.0029268).

This is likely to be enough to affect soil life profoundly. It has also emerged that the chemicals get into vegetation around fields and into streams and ponds.A common argument in favor of neonicotinoides is that they provide economic benefits, and that alternative pest-control methods are worse.

But studies from US, for example, shows that yields of soy a bean do not benefit at all from dressing seed with neonicotinoides, despite this being standard practice (Journal of Economic Entomology, DOI: 10.1603/ec11429).

The European Food Safety Agency spent six months evaluating the evidence and concluded that current use of neonicotinoides poses unacceptable risks.Sadly, given that farmers, in the UK, get most of their technical advice from pesticide companies, it is reasonable to suppose that a good proportion of UK pesticide use may be unnecessary.

For more see SUMMARY REPORT: www.efsa.europa.eu; November, 2013;EFSA Scientific Colloquium: Towards holistic approaches to the risk assessment of multiple stressors in bees (15-16 May 2013, Parma, Italy).

In oder to develop an holistic approach to risk assessment of multiple pressures on bees, several key issues were identified and discussed by all participants of the Colloquium:

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Much of the existing knowledge of the biology, impact and values of bees is from the single managed honeybee species A. mellifera. Much less is known about wild species, including bumblebees and solitary bees. However, bee diversity is important for the delivery of pollination services.

In many cases, for example, in determining the effects of pesticides on bees, standardised protocols exist for laboratory tests on honeybees. However, the honeybee does not necessarily react in the same way as bumblebees and/or solitary bees, and effects cannot always be generalized.

In addition, many assays are designed to determine lethal effects (e.g. LD50 - median lethal dose required to kill 50% of the test animals) and do not evaluate sub-lethal effects which may also eventually lead to mortality.

There is, therefore, an urgent need to validated bio-assays for testing sub-sublethal effects of environmental stressors, not just on honeybees, but on all beess.

Furthermore, testing on individual bees does not allow evaluation of potential impact on the entire colony (for social bees) and population (for all bees). It is important to be able to scale-up from assessments on individuals to understand what the impact will be on the population and ultimately community of bees.

Bees are exposed to multiple pressures and testing one stressor in a laboratory setting may be meaningless if exposure to additional stressors, which bees are exposed to in the field, modify the responses of individuals, colonies and populations. However, manipulative assays with multiple interacting factors can easily become too large to be practical or feasible. Field-scale experiments offer the opportunity to test impacts of multiple drivers at ecologically relevant scale, but are less controllable, need to be well designed and conducted at the appropriate scale. Thus, there is a hierarchy of approaches to testing effect of multiple pressures:

1. Laboratory assays are required to understand specific lethal and sub-lethal effects of single stressors, or limited number of stressors combination, on key species (which may be either those that are most ecologically or economically important, or rare/declining and most in need to be determined.

2. Semi-field experiments are required to start to scale up from individual to colony/population level responses to single stressors, or limited number of stressors in combination.

3. Manipulative field experiments are required to understand colony/population and community level responses to stressors, although it is important that appropriate controls are included.

4. Meta-analyses and modeling are important to determine general trends and to understand multiple stressors. However, reliable data are required in order to parametrize models, which then require testing or validation n the field. Models are only good as the data which are used to create them. 5. Monitoring required to provide base-line data on exposure of individuals, colonies and populations to stressors; to determine existing population trends and impacts of stressors on bees and pollination; and to assess any recovery of bees following removal of stressors. Monitoring needs to occur over a large spatial, temporal and taxonomic scale, but it is very time consuming, requires taxonomic expertize and can be very expensive.

Ultimately, understanding the effects of multiple stressors is highly complex, but fundamental to determining the risks to bees and pollination services they deliver.

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Although beyond the remit of EFSA, it is also important to consider that pressure and mitigation strategies are not just confined to agriculture. Bees are affected by activities and processes beyond the farm environment at a landscape scale. For example, bees are affected by pesticides used by local authorities, private industries and in domestic situations, not just by those used by the farmer.

Furthermore, bees are exposed to environmental chemicals beyond pesticides, for example from industry, from mining/quarrying and from other anthropogenic activities and natural processes. Little is known about the exposure to and effects of other environmental chemicals, including heavy metals and naturally-occurring secondary plant compounds (associated with defense against herb -ivory).

Mitigation and conservation cannot just occur in the agricultural environment, but need to include local and regional authorities, private industry and the general public.

In addition, the issue of legislation and enforcement arose several times during the discussion groups and plenary discussion. The fact that this Colloquium is addressing multiple stressors is a step forward, but multiple stressors need to be incorporated into the regulatory framework. For example, in some circumstances, the same pesticide may be used in different ways and so there are different regulators regarding handling: there needs to be joined-up regulation on pesticide use

Several research priorities were highlighted, including:

1. Increase research into wild non-Apis bees, including monitoring and manipulative experiments at lab and field level (to clarify biology, exposure, impacts, communities and assemblages, pollination efficiency, effect of environmental context etc.).

2. Determine tipping points/tolerance thresholds for relationships between bees and pollination services.

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3. Model the effect of multiple pressure on bees from individual ro colony/population level to identify gaps, determine tipping points/tolerance thresholds and make testable predictions.

4. Validate bio-assays for determining lethal and sub-lethal effects to ensure they are robust for social and solitary bees. 5. Clarify protection goals and bring together legislative framework of agricultural polcy, pesticide plicy, biodiversity policies, etc. This will allow clarification of which questions need to be answered, which species should be tested, when, where and how.

There were several recurring points which arose during Colloquium which were presented at the end of the meeting as the “Key messages.” These included:- Risk assessment of multiple stressors is complex, and because it is complicated there are no easy answers,

- A lot is known about honeybees, but less about wild bees in terms of their biology, response to stressors and role in pollination. We cannot just focus on honeybees as the whole bee assembled is important in terms of food production, agro-economies and biodiversity in general,

- We do not know the resistance or resilience of bee populations and pollination function (i.e. how they respond to and how quickly they can recover from perturbations), nor what the thresholds are in terms of bee loss (how much loss can be tolerated before bee populations cannot recover, or before pollination services are lost). What are the tipping points? When does stress such as loss of foragers services affect the population level? When does bee diversity loss effect pollination services? Scaling up from individuals to populations is difficult. We need to understand ecological thresholds to be able to determine acceptable loss.

- End points/protection goals need to be clearly identified. Legislation is vague – how do you establish specific protection goals, particularly when different stakeholders have different priorities?

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- Some tools and indicators are available, but research is needed to inform decision-making, and other tools and indicators need to be developed. Models are only as good as the data which go into them. Researchers need to identify gaps, generate baseline data and then predictions can be made with suitable models,

- Stressors come from the wider landscape not just from agriculture and so monitoring and mitigation should not just be confined to agriculture,

- Effective communication among all stakeholders (scientists, beekeepers, farmers, decision makers...) is needed to improve information flow and to allow end-users to be better informed so that they can make better choices. This includes consolidating and making use of existing data sets.

Many research gaps have been identified and funding is required to make progress in terms of understanding and managing risks of multiple stressors on bees and pollination services.

Recent developmentFirst:Last winter; i.e. 2014, was a little kinder to America's honeybees, but they are still in danger. Good food could help them, though. After a survey of US beekeepers, the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) found that 23% of colonies died last winter, down from an average of 29% over the past 8 years. It's an improvement, but it's not enough. The trouble is, it's not clear why the bees are dying.“I think of it like a cancer” says Jeffery Pettis, of the USDA Agricultural Research Service in Bettsville, Maryland. “It can come from all kinds of exposures and problems.”

Nutrition is the key to healthy colonies, says Marla Spivak of the University of Minnesota in St. Paul. She found, in an ongoing study, evidence that pollen is crucial. Artificial feeds won't cut it.

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“They need real food”, she says. Our practice is to get rid of flowers. The biggest help would be to put those flowers back.

There is also more evidence that pesticides have played at least some role in the decline of bees. Chensheng Lu of the Harvard School of Public Health and hiscolleagues recently found that bees exposed to two neonicotinoid pesticides, clothianidin and imidacloprid, were less likely to survive the winter than bees that hadn't been exposed to the pesticides. Half of the 12 colonies exposed to the pesticides did not make it through winter.

Source: Bulettin of Insectology, vol 67, p 125, 2014.

Dancing honeybees assess the health of the environment by Shreya Dasgupta

Second: Eavesdropping may be rude, but snooping on honeybee conversation could reveal a lot about the environment.Their unique mode of communication, the waggle dance, contains clues about the health of the landscape they live in. In effect, the bees are giving a thumbs-up or thumbs-down to different methods of conservation. A worker honeybee performs the waggle dance to tell her live mates where the best food is located. That suggest the dance can indicate areas of the landscape that are healthy, at least in terms of food for pollinators.

To test this, Margot Couvillon and her colleagues from the University of Sussex in Brighton, UK, videoed and decoded 5484 waggle dances from three laboratory-maintained honeybee colonies living in 94 square kilometers of rural and urban landscapes. They divided the area into various conservation schemes, regulated by the UK government, and mapped which areas were most frequented by the bees over two years.

“Using honeybee colonies as bio-monitors for environmental health is an idea that researchers have been interested in, “ says James Neih from the University of California, San Diego.

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“However, this study uses a far larger sample size and examines the data in a more sophisticated way.”

Most honeybees cast their votes for Castle Hill, a nature reserve rich in wildflowers, 2 kilometers from the hives. The bees also preferred to feed on farms covered by Higher Level Stewardship schemes. Such farms are supposed to set aside part of their land for wildlife and wildflowers, which may explain why the bees liked them. However the bees did not seem particularly enticed by farms covered by Organic Entry Level Stewardship. While organic farming may seem harmonious with healthy wildlife, these schemes involve regular cutting and mowing in the first few years.

“What that probably means for honeybees is that there are no flowers at all, just short grass,” says Couvillon. Listening in on honeybee conversation could be a quick and cost-effective way of evaluating costly management schemes that aim to make lands more wildlife-friendly, Couvillion says. What's more, honeybees are generalists, to identifying areas that they prefer whichever area offers the most nectar or pollen, regardless of weather it is a diverse wildflower meadow or a vast mono-culture. But honeybees may not tell as everything we need to know, says Lars Chittka of Queen Mary , University of London. He says they probably prefer whichever area offers the most nectar or pollen, regardless of weather it is a diverse wildflower meadow or a vast mono-culture.

“So what's good for honeybee is not necessarily good for any other species.”

Journal reference: Current Biology, DOI: 10.1016/j.cub. 2014.03.072

Many people believe that they're helping conserve bees by setting up their own beehive.

Third:According to the German University of Hohenheim, bees provide services to the figure of the 70 billion dollars per year. Bees play a fundamental role in food production. They pollinate a wide range of crops and the honey variety delivers valuable food production to humans.

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Per Kryger, a senior scientist at Denmark's Aarhus University, says “a world without bees would be a whole lot poorer.”With other scientists from an association called Prevention of Honey Bee Colony Losses (COLONSS) have carried out research to find out how bees can have the best chances of survival.

Usually, beekeepers purchase queen bees from other regions to maintain their bee colonies. But Kryger's team has found that bees which are adopted to their local environment fare much better in their chances of survival than bees that which have been imported from a different region.

According to COLOSS, local queens live an average of 83 days longer than colonies with imported queens. The most effective way to maintain the bee populations natural diversity is to strengthen the breeding programmes with local honey bees.

“It would also help to prevent the collapse of bee colonies, optimize sustainable productivity and make it possible to maintain continual adaptation to environmental changes”, says Kryger. Regionally adapted bees can cope better with the challenges of modern life.

“There were times when people kept a lot more hives so that they could earn a bit extra from selling the honey. These days, it's getting fashionable to keep bees but people don't take an enough separate hives.”

But Peter Maske, president of German Association of Beekeepers, says it's just not enough. Healthy colonies need an environment that offers them enough nectar and pollen to keep them going all year round. They also need humans to help them cope with the varroa mite and make sure it doesn't spread. Added to that threat, another problem is that beekeepers don't keep enough hives to be able to select and compensate for loss – currently, there are about 750,000 bee colonies in Germany, for example. 5o year ago, there were almost three times as many colonies.

Stay-at-home bees live longest – Environment, www.dw.de, 01.08.2014.

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Annex IPart b – SummaryChapter 16. Seed-dressing systemic insecticides and honeybees by Laura Maxim and Jeroen van der Slujis

In 1994 French beekeepers began to report alarming signs. During summer, many honeybees did not return to the hives. Honeybees gathered close together in small groups on the ground or hovered, disoriented, in front of the hive and displayed abnormal foraging behavior. These signs were accompanied by winter loss.Evidence pointed to Bayer's seed-dressing systemic insecticide Gaucho, which contains the active substance imidacloprid. This chapter presented the historical evolution of evidence on the risks of Gaucho to honeybees in sunflower and maize seed-dressing in France, and analyze the action in response to the accumulating evidence regarding these risks.

The social process that ultimately lead to application of the precautionary principle for the ban of Gaucho are described, with a focus on the ways in which scientific findings were used by stakeholders and decision-makers to influence policy during the controversy.

Public scientists were in a difficult position in this case. The result f their work were central to a social debate with high economic and political stakes. In certain cases their work was not judged according to its scientific merit but based on whether or not it supported the positions of some stakeholders. This situation tested the ability and courage of researchers to withstand pressure and continue working on imidacloprid. Other European countries also suspended neonicotinoid seed-dressing insecticides. Evidence of the toxicity of neonicotinoids present in the dust emitted during sowing of coated seeds supported such decisions.

Most important, the French case highlighted the major weaknesses of regulatory risk assessment and marketing authorization of pesticides, and particularly neonicotinoidd. These insights were recently confirmed by work by the European Food Safety Authority.

From this case study eight lessons are drawn about governance of controversies related to chemical risks. The study is followed by two additional texts. A first panel presents Bayer Crop Science's comments on the analysis in this chapter. A second contains the authors' response to the Bayer comments.

Source: European Environment Agency, Report No 1/2013., Late lessons from early warnings: science, precaution, innovation, Summary; EEA, Copenhagen, 2013

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References:http://cordis.europa.eu/research-eu ; research*EU Results Magazine No. 42 May 2015

www.newscientist.org/life accessed in May 2014.

www.dw.de/accessed in August 2014.

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