bees

This Sunday is World Food Day. It is a day to renew our commitment to ending the root causes of hunger.

It is also an opportunity to highlight the true costs of pesticide-dependent agriculture, and the corporate-controlled food system that goes with it. At PAN we're doing two things: celebrating bees and berating the Big 6. Join us!

Help start a national conversation on pesticides and bees by spreading the word about this hard-hitting, in-depth investigative report.

Dan Rather's investigative reporting team has produced a follow-up to their 2006 inquiry into Colony Collapse Disorder. Five years later, the situation remains substantively unaddressed by EPA.

Honey bees are still dying off at an average rate of 34% year, and the millions of dollars Congress set aside to investigate the issue has yielded no actionable findings for the federal agencies charged with stemming the tide of honey bee decline. 

I have never been an organizer.  Tell me where the march is, and I’ll show up if I can.   

But several months ago I got an e-mail forward from Graham White, a beekeeper in Scotland. It said something to the effect of: “Hey beekeepers, picture this: a flash mob for the bees!”

In an apparent, and failed, attempt at self-defense, honey bees are sealing off pesticide-laced pollen.

U.S. entomologists published a study two years ago that described a newly observed phenomenon in honey bees, now known as entombed pollen: food stores sealed off by bees after being deposited in the hive. That pollen was much higher in pesticide residues than any other pollen stored in the hive, and correspondingly had no detectable bacteria or fungi. Hives with entombed pollen were more than twice as likely to collapse later in the season than hives without it.

Ready to geek out? We’ve updated our pesticide residue database, What’s On My Food?, with the latest chemical and toxicology data – including a new dimension that tracks bee-toxic pesticides. And we made a widget!

What's a widget? Fair question. It’s a snippet of computer code that allows you (or your favorite blogger) to host the What’s On My Food? search function on your website or blog. You can download it here.