Colony Collapse Disorder Research Paper

Every spring, Central Valley, California is a-buzz with bees pollinating millions – perhaps billions – of almond, plum and other fruit blossoms that depend primarily on bees as pollinators to produce edible fruits and nuts. Bees, besides producing honey, are essential to pollinating up to 35% of the world’s food supply – that’s worth nearly $30 billion a year. However, things aren’t buzzing smoothly; bees, including wild bees, honeybees and bumblebees, are disappearing at a dangerously fast rate with some species already vanished into extinction. This problem known as Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD), was first seen in the late 1970s, but profoundly mushroomed in the early 1990s and largely hypothesized by many scientists due to the introduction …show more content…
They became very popular in the United States, Canada, and Europe in the early 2000s and were widely used to replace organochlorine pesticides such as DDT and Aldrin, which were highly toxic to the environment, accumulating in the soil and ecosystem food web for many decades. Unlike the older pesticides, neonics do not appear to cause long term damage to the environment, yet some minor residues has been found in many foods. However, they are water soluble and enter a plant’s tissues directly and have the potential to stay in the leaves, blossoms and nectar for the life of the plant. This is very beneficial for the farmers as they only need to apply the pesticides once to fend of the voracious insect attackers, but not so much for the bees, who feed on the same blossoms. Although, the pesticides are applied at such low dose it may not instantly kill the bees; however, studies have found they have devastating effects on their population. Neonic pesticides act on the bees nervous and immune system damaging their navigation ability and making them vulnerable to many viruses and …show more content…
They exposed bees to neonicotinoid insecticide clothianidin and found quite stunning results. Primarily, they discovered that “honey bees are exposed to a wealth of synergistically interacting stress factors, which may induce colony losses often associated with high infection levels of pathogens. Neonicotinoid insecticides have been reported to enhance the impact of pathogens, but the underlying immune alteration is still obscure” (Di Prisco). This study strongly suggested that bees exposed to a certain neonic pesticides become more easily infected by the gut parasite Nosema. Ever since neonicotinoids were introduced, the vulnerability of bees getting one of the half-dozen bee diseases or viruses has significantly increased and so has the rates of

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