Glyphosate and Neonicotinoids are Poisoning Honeybees (and the World)

Prologue

The twentieth century gave birth to honeybee neurotoxins – organophosphate, carbamate and neonicotinoid pesticides. It also gave birth to glyphosate, a weed killer that achieved global significance, being the biggest selling pesticide — ever. But where does this chemical come from? Rosemary Mason, a European physician, prolific science writer, and environmentalist, tracked down the toxic birth of glyphosate. At her 2021 Open Letter to Head of Pesticide Unit at the European Food Safety Authority, she explained how Monsanto created glyphosate. She said:

“Monsanto’s weedkiller comes from beneath the soil. The active ingredient in Roundup is glyphosate, which is ultimately derived from elemental phosphorous extracted from phosphate rock buried below ground. Monsanto gets its phosphate from mines in Southeast Idaho near the town of Soda Springs, a small community of about 3,000 people. The company has been operating there since the 1950s. I went to visit last summer [2020], and what I found was startling. I stood just beyond a barbed-wire fence at about nine o’clock at night and watched as trucks dumped molten red heaps of radioactive refuse over the edge of what is fast becoming a mountain of waste. This dumping happened about every fifteen minutes, lighting up the night sky. Horses grazed in a field just a few dozen yards away, glowing in the radiating rays coming from the lava-like sludge. Rows of barley, for Budweiser beer, waved in the distance.”

Glyphosate in the market, 1974

We don’t know when Monsanto figured out phosphate rock would become its gold-minting weed killer glyphosate. But we know that, in 1974, Monsanto received EPA’s blessing to start selling glyphosate to farmers. Billions of kilograms of glyphosate have drenched America.

During my tenure at the US EPA, I did not know if glyphosate was tested by IBT, a large private laboratory that used fake data in testing pesticides for decades. But glyphosate studies came out of IBT. Other researchers^[1] also say glyphosate came out of the house of IBT.^[2] The truth is that a cloud of suspicion and outright agribusiness fraud has tainted glyphosate and Monsanto, a subsidiary of the German chemical and pharmaceutical giant Bayer. This history and Monsanto’s fight for global dominance give glyphosate the attention of champions. It is the “active” ingredient of the popular roundup weed killer and the driver of Roundup Ready, genetically engineered crops designed to tolerate the killing power of glyphosate. Monsanto claims the best, almost harmless virtues, for its precious glyphosate products. Most international organizations, governments, agricultural universities, and the agribusiness industry like Monsanto. Glyphosate continues to be the powerhouse of week killers and GMOs – worldwide.

Biological warfare, glyphosate style

Glyphosate, however, does huge damage because, for several decades, it has been touching the environment and public health in vast quantities. According to Don Huber, expert in chemical and biological warfare and professor emeritus of microbiology at Purdue University, glyphosate makes it difficult for crops to absorb micronutrients necessary for their health and nutrition. This means that honeybees suffer from collecting nectar and pollen from crops and wildflowers affected by glyphosate, being deficient in those vital micronutrients. This is because glyphosate acts as a powerful antibiotic against these bacteria. Honeybees eating nectar and pollen from flowers sprayed by glyphosate don’t have these life-saving bacteria (lactobacillus and bifidobacterium). And without them honeybees cannot digest the nectar they collect and the honey they make. They become disoriented in their foraging.

Anthony Samsel, a research scientist, and consultant on public health, reminded me that glyphosate “causes Alzheimer disease in the honeybee, Apis mellifera. It destroys memory in the creature, so that it forgets its way home. This is probably also true of the Monarch butterfly!” Add neonicotinoid sprays to the broad deleterious mantle of glyphosate covering the agricultural regions of the Earth, and the honeybees are cooked. My beekeeper friend in Colorado is right. Neonicotinoids are straightforward nerve poisons. They, too, disorient honeybees and kill them outright.

Entomologists warn that neonicotinoids are spreading all over the world, contaminating the environment, harming and killing beneficial insects, pollinators, and threatening ecosystems and food webs. They also suggested that unless we are careful and act on time and regulate or eliminate neonicotinoids, we are bound to repeat the disastrous course of the world contaminated by DDT, the ecocide that gave birth to Silent Spring of Rachel Carson, 1962. More than fifty years after EPA banned DDT in 1972, Americans and people around the world have detectable traces of DDT in their bodies. Birds like the California condor and peregrine falcon are just making a comeback from a near certain DDT extinction. We should avoid repeating this toxic history.^[3]

Ban glyphosate, worldwide

This is a valuable lesson that we ignore at our peril. Neonicotinoids have become the new DDT for farmers. We should act promptly and interrupt that addiction and prevent the extinction of honeybees. At the same time, we need to be alert about the other gigantic menace: glyphosate. In the logic of Don Huber, glyphosate is just as dreadful to honeybees as the neonicotinoids. In the presence of glyphosate, “honeybees are starving to death even with plenty of honey and bee bread in the hive,” Huber says. In addition, glyphosate disrupts the hormones of honeybees, which means honeybees “never learn to forage efficiently.” “Put glyphosate and Neonics [neonicotinoids] together in the environment, as we have, and the bees don’t have a chance!” Huber wrote me. In addition, Huber is certain that the two microorganisms that glyphosate kills, lactobacillus and bifidobacterium, do more than help honeybees digest their food. They give honeybees “immunity to mites, foul brood, viruses and stress”: “so with very low drift of glyphosate,” Huber says, “you see all of these [illnesses] present because glyphosate gives bees a bad case of ‘AIDS,’” by which he means glyphosate destroys their immune system.

Epilogue

Huber is right. We must “remove” glyphosate. I would add neonicotinoids, and most pesticides deserve the same fate of removal. Pesticides are big business.

The pesticide industry is valued at about $ 50 billion. Something like 80 percent of its 600 active ingredients are weed killers. “No wonder,” Mason says, “Bayer doesn’t want to lose its license for glyphosate or for clothianidin, a long- acting neonicotinoid insecticide that is very persistent in the soil. Both chemicals are on the market illegally thanks to the corrupt EU and US regulatory authorities.”

Mason also reminds us that the owner of Monsanto and glyphosate, Bayer, the German giant company of chemicals and pharmaceuticals, is none other than the post-WWII continuation of I.G. Farben, the chemical German colossus of WWII. Farben worked closely with the Nazi German state. It operated the concentration camp at Auschwitz, where its nerve gases killed hundreds of thousands of European Jews.

NOTES

1. Carol Van Strum, “”Failure to Regulate: Pesticide Data Fraud Comes Home to Roost,” Truthout, April 9, 2015. ↑

2. I give a detailed account of IBT in my book, Poison Spring: The Secret History of Pollution and the EPA. ↑

3. S. D. Frank and T. F. Tooker, “Neonicotinoids pose undocumented threats to food webs,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, September 2, 2020. ↑

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