Proceedings of the Standing Senate Committee on
Agriculture and Forestry
Issue 18 - Evidence - Meeting of October 21, 2014
OTTAWA, Tuesday, October 21, 2014
The Standing Senate Committee on Agriculture and Forestry met this day at 5:25 p.m. to continue its study on the importance of bees and bee health in the production of honey, food and seed in Canada.
Senator Percy Mockler (Chair) in the chair.
[Translation]
The Chair: Welcome to this meeting of the Standing Senate Committee on Agriculture and Forestry.
[English]
My name is Percy Mockler, senator from New Brunswick, chair of the committee. At this time, I would like to begin by asking senators to introduce themselves, starting on my left, please.
[Translation]
Senator Robichaud: Good evening, gentlemen. I am Senator Fernand Robichaud from Saint-Louis-de-Kent, New Brunswick.
[English]
Senator Tardif: Good afternoon. I'm Claudette Tardif, senator for the province of Alberta.
[Translation]
Senator Maltais: Good evening. Senator Ghislain Maltais from Quebec.
[English]
Senator Beyak: Senator Lynn Beyak, Ontario.
Senator Enverga: Tobias Enverga, Ontario.
Senator Oh: Victor Oh, Ontario.
Senator Ogilvie: Kelvin Ogilvie, Nova Scotia.
The Chair: To the witnesses, the committee is continuing its study on the importance of bees and bee health in the production of honey, food and seed in Canada.
The Senate of Canada gave an order of reference to the Standing Senate Committee on Agriculture and Forestry to be authorized to examine and report on the importance of bees and bee health in the production of honey, food and seed in Canada. As we are all aware, bees are crucial for the pollination of commercial plant, fruit and vegetable crops. According to the Canadian Honey Council, the value of honeybees to the pollination of crops is estimated at over $2 billion annually.
Honourable senators, we welcome today, by video conference, from the University of Montana-Missoula, Dr. Jerry Bromenshenk and Dr. Colin Henderson.
Thank you for accepting our invitation to give your thoughts and comments and to share your experience with the Standing Senate Committee on Agriculture and Forestry on the mandate that we have been given, the study of bees.
I will ask Dr. Bromenshenk and Dr. Henderson to make their presentations, following which we will commence with questions from the senators.
The direction from the clerk is that the presentation will be shared by both doctors, so I would ask Dr. Bromenshenk to start the presentation, to be followed by Dr. Henderson.
Jerry J. Bromenshenk, as an individual: Thank you, Mr. Chair and honourable senators. I have a PhD in entomology and have worked with honeybees for over 40 years. This is my colleague, Colin Henderson.
Colin B. Henderson, as an individual: My PhD is in plant-animal biochemical interactions.
Mr. Bromenshenk: Today we thought we would share with you some of the data we have concerning a category of chemicals that has been getting a lot of attention from the press, the beekeepers and the scientific community. We, between us, have many years of experience through the university. We also have a private company that does GLP- level contract research. Over the years, we have worked for the EPA in the U.S., the U.S. Department of Energy, the U.S. Department of Defense, a variety of private corporations, and beekeepers. We've worked here and in many places around the world.
Some folks know us as the people who established the ability to train bees to seek out things. They're referred to, at times, as sniffer bees. They find bombs and explosives and chemicals. Many years ago, working with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, I pioneered the use of honeybees as sentinel or monitor systems to look at environmental toxins, not only pesticides but also pollutants. I itemize some of those topics in the written statement that we submitted.
Today I'd like to talk about a contemporary problem, and that is the actual dietary exposures of honeybees to the neonicotinoid pesticides on crops grown from seed treated with these chemicals. In particular, I'd like to address two chemicals commonly used in North America. One is clothianidin and the other one is imidacloprid.
Starting in 2010, my colleagues and I started a series of research projects done under GLP. We sampled bee colonies for the nectar and pollen that they collected. In some cases, vegetation was sampled in two major areas: the Corn Belt of the United States and the canola seed fields in the area of Lethbridge, Canada.
To date, as far as we know, this is probably the largest set of studies ever done in terms of the number of fields, area canvassed, and number of samples. This speaks to some of the bee health issues because it gives you hard data on realistic dietary exposures to honeybees.
If you read the literature and listen to the media, you get a wide range of numbers. Our data says that these numbers are at times inflated and that the typical situation tells a very different story. I'm not going to read through the report that I gave you, but I will hit some highlights.
In 2011, I personally set up the study in the canola fields in Canada. In the area surrounding Lethbridge, Canada, we went in all compass directions and picked relatively geographically isolated canola fields. In these canola fields, which were raised from seed treated with clothianidin, we sampled just before it bloomed, during bloom and as the bloom was declining. From within the colonies, we sampled nectar that the bees had collected. We sampled pollen with traps mounted to the front of the colonies. These were brand new traps, so there's no chance of cross-contamination. Each of these traps was specifically left on a colony. Therefore, we had three sampling times during the bloom period.
In the paperwork that I gave you, on table 1, you will see an analysis of approximately 90 samples — 30 were taken in each of the three time periods. You will notice that in the pollen collected by the bees, the average for mean concentration of clothianidin was 1.69, 1.39, 1.83 and 1.86. In other words, everything was below 2 parts per billion. For reference, we had two different laboratories do the analysis so we could compare the results from the two. We got good concurrence. These laboratories with modern equipment have a limit of detection of around 1 to 2 parts per billion in terms of what the instrument can reliably see. What we are looking at here is that in these fields, at the time of the year when the canola is releasing pollen and it is being collected by bees, the levels of residues of the clothianidin are hovering just barely above the detection limits of the instruments.
The maximum levels ranged from 4.06 to 4.14. Those are the highest levels that we saw. Again, those are well below the reported values for which you would expect to see any observable effect.
We also sampled nectar from these areas because bees aggressively forage for both nectar and pollen from canola. As far as the bees are concerned, canola is a great crop. They like to collect both the pollen for protein and the nectar as their carbohydrate or sugar source.
The nectar values were even lower. The overall average value was 0.84 and through the time periods was 0.82, 0.85 and 0.84. Those are slightly below the reliable detection level of the instrument.
The maximum levels were 1.71 on average, and by time were 1.44, 1.71 and 1.49. They were just at the 2 part per billion level.
I should also mention that five years ago these same laboratories could not detect residues below 5 parts per billion. If these samples had been analyzed five years ago, everything that I have been talking about would not have been seen. It shows the improvement in the instrumentation.
By comparison, we also did studies in corn fields, in the Corn Belt of the United States. In 2010, we sampled pollen from corn tassels. Using the same type of traps, we collected pollen that the bees collected and brought in. Corn doesn't produce any nectar, so the only results we have is for the pollen that the bees collected. We essentially collected samples from corn fields all the way across Illinois, from east to west. In 2010, we also sampled in east Indiana. Then we went into Nebraska the next year and sampled 30 some fields three times over, just as we had done with the canola. We actually sampled the canola and the Nebraska corn fields in the same year. Rather than belabour the point, in the document that I provided you, in table 3, I summarized the results for those 53 fields, over two years.
Again, we find that the mean or average amount of clothianidin in the bee-collected pollen was 1.15 parts per billion. The maximum was 4. The minimum here is listed at 0.44 and is actually calculated because the instrument goes down to about 1 part per billion and then gets pretty noisy. At zero — it would be optimistic to assume that all these had no trace at all — it's below the measurable level. For some of the statistics, we used a conservative of 0.44 as the minimum detection limit.
We also looked at the clothianidin concentrations in honeybee-collected pollen by grower. We had several different growers. We saw some variations, but it ranged from about 0.5 to 1.78 at the maximum. Again, we saw very low levels.
Table 5 gives you the most succinct comparison of everything, including the 53 corn fields from the three states and the 30 canola fields from the Lethbridge area. You will see that the average clothianidin concentration in parts per billion of pollen was 1.1 for corn and 1.7 for canola. The maximum for the corn pollen is in the ninety-fifth percentile — that is 95 percent of the samples were below 2.8 parts per billion for corn or 3.9 for canola. The nectar was lower in concentration than the pollen at 0.8 for the canola, and the maximum with 95 percent of the values below 1.4.
Overall, this says that the results we saw shows minimal exposure to these neonic pesticides to bee colonies that are placed right on the margins of these fields. They're not collecting much pollen from corn, but they are collecting pollen from canola. We did a study. If bees are free-ranging and are free to collect pollen, they will go to a diverse array of pollen sources.
In these same studies we took pollen collected by the bees. In addition to analyzing it for pesticides, we also analyzed it for how much was corn pollen versus pollen from other plants. In the canola area, we analyzed how much was canola pollen versus pollen from other plants. In the canola area, we found that all the samples had some pollen from canola. The maximum amount of pollen from canola was the sample that was almost purely canola pollen at 99 percent; and 95 percent of the samples contained some pollen, but less than 80 percent were from canola. Not all of the bees were going to canola. Some of the bees were going elsewhere, even though they were surrounded by canola fields.
There was a weak correlation between canola in pollen samples and the clothianidin concentration. We really didn't see any observable trend of an increased correlation as the pollination period progressed. What we saw is that if you've got a lot of canola pollen, you will see a little bit or traces of the pesticide. What was really clear was that bees were freely collecting pollen from canola, but in many cases the colony still diluted that by collecting pollen from other sources.
We got a different story from corn, as you might expect. Corn is usually considered to be wind pollinated. Bees are not considered to forage on corn pollen unless they just can't find anything else. In fact, our data said that for these areas, corn pollen in the traps consisted of less than 16 per cent of the total amount of pollen. In other words, they really weren't collecting much corn pollen. The maximum amount of corn we saw in any sample was 74 per cent, not the 100 per cent we saw in the canola, and 95 per cent of the samples contained less than 48 per cent corn, or less than half of it was corn. About 40 per cent of the fields picked up samples that had minimal or really no significant amount of corn at all. I think my colleague will speak briefly to the preferences of bees.
In the corn area, we didn't see any correlation to speak of between pesticide concentration and the amount of corn in the sample, and we didn't see any real correlation between the amount of pesticide in the corn and that in the tassel itself. This was for Illinois-Indiana corn fields.
For Nebraska, we saw a similar thing. Corn pollen was less than 25 per cent of the bee-collected pollen on average, and 16 per cent of the samples had no corn in them at all. The maximum corn percentage was 89 per cent, and 95 per cent of the samples had less than 77 per cent corn. In this case, we did see a bit of a correlation between clothianidin concentration and percentage corn in the sample. That's probably a reflection that the pesticide used in Nebraska was a higher concentration so that the application rate was greater.
I've thrown a lot of numbers at you, so let me try to summarize briefly. Since bees collect both nectar and pollen from canola, the dietary exposure of those colonies placed near canola fields would be expected to be greater than colonies placed near corn since bees don't really like corn very well. In the Corn Belt, honeybees collected corn pollen less frequently than if they had foraged randomly.
Of the 53 corn fields that we sampled bees beside, basically 72 per cent of the habitat around those fields was corn fields. Only less than about one third was actually anything other than corn, but the average amount of corn pollen found in those colonies was only 19 per cent. So less corn pollen was collected by these colonies than you would expect based in terms of the amount of corn fields in the area. Stated another way, there was 3.8 times more corn habitat available to bees than reflected by the amount of corn pollen that they picked up, again suggesting that bees aren't very keen on collecting corn pollen.
Conversely, and not unexpectedly, bees used canola pollen heavily. The average amount of canola pollen was 72 per cent, and 41 per cent of the samples were composed entirely of canola pollen.
Now there's one other little bit of data that I would like to mention. There are a lot of questions about whether these pesticides, the neonicotinoids particularly, build up in soil residue. Although we have data from a study that we did not participate in that suggests there was no real correlation between years of use or amount of pesticide used in the seed treatment, Dr. Henderson and myself did a study in 10 fields in southern California. These were melon fields. The State of California wanted to know about fields that had been used more than two years where they had been planted with seeds treated with, in this case, a different neonicotinoid called imidacloprid. Their question was: Does the soil affect the exposure to the bees? They wanted it broken down into soil categories. They broke the soil down into fields that had heavy soils and fields that had medium soils. The state would have liked to have seen fields with sandy soil, but we found that melons don't grow well in sandy soil, so the choices were heavy soil or medium soil.
To be sure that we were sampling bee-collected pollen and bee-collected nectar from melons grown in fields that had been used for at least two years, and if there was any tendency to build up residue, we used tents overtop of the melon rows. The tents were 100 feet long and 10 feet tall, and they straddled several rows. We then put one bee colony inside.
We had intended to sample early in the bloom, mid bloom and late bloom. However, we found out that we had a tremendously difficult time getting enough nectar from within the colony and enough pollen in the pollen trap to even run a chemical analysis. In this case, we only used one chemical analysis lab because the samples were so tiny. We had to go out every day with tweezers and pick pollen off of bees and out of the pollen traps and take syringes to pull the nectar out of the colonies.
When we looked at colonies that were outside of the tents that were brought in for pollination of the melons, if they came in with good food supplies, they had lost ground in terms of their food stores by the time they were removed in a couple weeks from pollination of melons. If they had come in light with food, the beekeeper had to feed those colonies. The take-home message was that there were scant resources of nectar and pollen available from the melons.
Table 5 gives you the observed values of the pesticide imidacloprid in melon nectar and melon pollen. In nectar, we see 1.2 and 1.6 parts per billion, just a little bit more than we saw in the canola with clothianidin. In the bee-collected pollen, the average was less than 10 across the fields in both cases.
Now, there's a caveat. What we didn't expect these tents to do was block and slow down the passage of air or wind through them. The Imperial Valley, where this study was done, is prone to very windy days with very heavy winds. When the wind came across the fields on hot, sunny days, it whipped up and re-entrained the dust from the surface dust of the fields, and that was carried by the winds. As the winds went through the tents, the fabric slowed the wind velocity down and we got a deposition of the dust down onto the melon plants. In some of those tents, you could barely see that those plants were green anymore. The results I'm showing you here are not simply the systemic uptake of the pesticide from the seed through the plant to the nectar and pollen and then into the beehive because it was collected by the bees, but this is also showing you the pollen particularly that is exposed to that dusting or fallout dust.
This is a very worse-case scenario and yet, in this worse-case scenario, heavy dust, the worst we saw was still below 10 parts per billion. Well, there was one that was 13, but the point that we're making is about observable effects levels for these two pesticides. There are some different studies that dealt with different numbers, but they are generally somewhere in the range of 20 to 30 parts per billion before you expect to see any effects at all, and all of this data is considerably below that.
This is what the data says, and we thought that it was important to introduce it into the discussion so that you had examples from what's probably the largest study of fields over the largest geographical areas, both for canola in Canada and for corn in the U.S. that to our knowledge has been done or at least to our knowledge has been reported.
This data was all reported to the Society of Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry of North America in November of 2013. Dr. Henderson presented it to the American Beekeepers Conference in Hershey, Pennsylvania, the year before, and I presented it to the American Honey Producers Association out in California. Those are our two national bee associations.
That's a bit of what we wanted to say. I'm going to ask my colleague Dr. Henderson whether he would like to expand on these points.
Mr. Henderson: Honourable chair and senators, I appreciate the chance to visit with you here.
I think Dr. Bromenshenk has shared a lot of the details and what I would prefer to do would be to wrap up what our findings have been. We have collected samplings in crops favoured by honeybees over a wide area and over several years, for example canola, and crops that become incidental food sources for honeybees. Corn in particular may be considered representative of what would be a non-target crop or a non-preferred food for honeybees and yet sometimes honeybees are exposed to it.
Even though we had two different categories of pollen and nectar resources that we sampled, we found fairly consistent results. One, residues for the neonicotinoid pesticides are very low in the nectar and in the pollen that the honeybees take advantage of; two, residues don't seem to accumulate in the soils. In the melon study in southern California, these heavy, sandy loam soils were soils that were thought to accumulate residues because of their water- holding capacity and because of the nature of the charges and heaviness of the soils. They are not clay soils, so they are not saturated all the time. But for that growing area, they were reasonably dense soils that would hold residues longer, yet in every case we did not see accumulation of significant levels of residues in either of those.
The fact that we only had one sample in all of the sampling that we had that rose to the level of what in laboratory trials has been indicated as the concentration of pesticide that produces observable physiological effects, which is somewhere in the neighbourhood of 20 parts per billion, the one sample that we did find that exceeded that was 24 parts per billion, approximately, and 95 per cent of our samples actually were at half that level or lower. It was a corn tassel pollen sample that we collected that did that.
Our observations are that while it is certainly true that in direct applications, if bees come in direct contact with these pesticides, they have direct effects. They are pesticides. They are targeted at killing organisms.
As far as we knew from our studies, when used according to label for seed treatments only in the crops that we evaluated, the levels of exposure that honeybees experienced in their food resources were minimal. Approximately 30 per cent of all the samples we collected had no detectable levels of pesticide in them whatsoever.
In terms of field or practical risk to honeybees is that in the normal flowering season when honeybee colonies are actively foraging, using pollen resources and nectar resources, in the studies we've conducted so far there is low level exposure that is 10 times or less below what the lowest level of expected physiological effect would be.
The Chair: Thank you, witnesses. We will commence questioning with Senator Tardif.
Senator Tardif: Thank you for a very interesting and thorough presentation. There was a lot of technical information. I'm not sure that I absorbed it all, but I did understand that canola is favoured by honeybees, that corn is not a preferred food crop for honeybees, and that there appeared to be little residue left in the soil when neonicotinoids were used. This is what I got in general terms. If that's not correct, please correct me.
I would like to come back to the question of soil residue and neonics in the soil because others have suggested to us in our hearings that the whole issue of neonics in the soil and as a residue is a problem.
You mentioned that the type of soil that the melons were grown in was a sandy loam. Is the type of soil a factor that could contribute to the results that you have found?
Also, the melons were planted in soil where there had been no use over two years, I think, or had been used for two years. If you had examined soil that had been used, for example, for five or ten years, would that have made a difference in your findings?
Mr. Henderson: If you'll pardon me, the soil study was that soils had been in continuous use for the three previous years, at least two years' planting with the same residue. We were actually looking for accumulations of residues in the soil.
Senator Tardif: If the soil had been used for five or ten years, I'm asking whether the length of time of the use of the neonicotinoids could be a significant factor in your findings.
Mr. Henderson: I think it's certainly the case that if we had had available to us field areas that had been in continuous use for longer periods of time that may have been the case.
One of the things we worked with was that in laboratory trials the pesticides have a 180-day half-life, so essentially a half a year and half of the product is gone. In tillage, all of these products are susceptible to ultraviolet breakdown; that is, they have a light reaction when exposed to sunlight and break down more rapidly.
In fact, one of the pesticides — Poncho is clothianidin — imidacloprid in particular, if it is exposed to sunlight it breaks down very quickly, 30 minutes to 40 minutes in a water mix. In the parameters for the study defined by the State of California and by the manufacturer, the three-year limit was a reasonable limit to look for accumulation of residues under those conditions.
It is possible. I cannot say; I don't have data. I have to be cautious that way. A heavier soil, a soil with more clay, might accumulate residues more, yet those clay soils also hold water more tightly and we see more rapid decomposition of these products in water when they are in soluble environments. I would have to yield to other studies and want to see what the soil parameters were, as well as the number of years of deposition and rate of deposition that was present.
Mr. Bromenshenk: It seems from the data we've had here and some others that we have available to us, the year of application and the amount of active ingredient — for example, in the corn field we looked at we talked about using Poncho 500 and Poncho 1250 — those numbers reflect the differences in the amount of pesticide concentration applied on the seed or amount of active ingredient. If the amount of active ingredient goes up, during the year that they first plant, for the first 180 days or more, you might expect to see some elevation.
In fact, anecdotally, we had this one field in the first year of study in the corn fields of Illinois-Indiana, when we collected the pollen from the tassels, we did have one field that was over 20 parts per billion, as Dr. Henderson indicated. When we talked to the grower, we found that that field had been planted and rained out, planted and rained out, and planted again. In a sense, there was much more active ingredient in the ground because various spots in the field had been planted two or three times, which would double or triple the amount of ingredient.
The data that we see here from our melon study and the SETAC data we had available to us from another study indicated there was no correlation to years of use or whether they used the higher amount of clothianidin or the Poncho 1250 versus the 500. The data just didn't show any long-term accumulation.
Now again, anecdotally, some years ago I did look at some cases in Canada where they were alleging problems with bees in the fields treated with neonicotinoids, but in that case they were trenching the pesticide into the ground and literally using implements to inject it into the soil.
If you look at the application rates, that tends to be a much higher concentration than when you treat the seed because these seeds, particularly for canola, are really tiny, so you're putting a minimal amount of pesticide into the soil. There may be a vast difference between using it the way it was originally designed as a seed treatment or using a small amount of chemical coated on the seed and that dissipates through the plant as it grows versus trenching it in. There is really no good data that I know of in terms of other application modes. Those seem to be some of the cases where we see problems reported.
Senator Tardif: Thank you.
[Translation]
Senator Dagenais: My thanks to our two guests. I have two relatively quick questions on bee health.
What do American researchers consider to be the priority for more in-depth research? Can you tell me about projects that are currently under way, as follow-ups to the priorities in your research?
[English]
Mr. Bromenshenk: To answer the second question first, the results we have presented are widely distributed amongst the research community and our regulatory agencies. We are currently writing an article for publication in the Open Press.
These were GLP — good laboratory practices — studies, so close attention was paid to the detailed experiments and how the analysis was done to assure the accuracy of the results.
Both Dr. Henderson and I attended some major workshops in the Washington, D.C./Virginia area last year, one with the stakeholders, the research community, beekeepers and folks from USDA that Dr. Henderson went to. I went to a similar one put on by the Environmental Protection Agency. These results were presented in that context.
In both of those workshops, with respect to neonicotinoid pesticides, although there are some researchers that obviously would disagree, the majority in their workshop report listed neonicotinoid pesticides as one of the lower priorities in terms of problems, with the exception of the potential for dust problems during corn planting. That's a very different scenario than the pollen and nectar that bees are collecting during bloom or pollen shed that occurs.
To address that, in North America the Corn Dust Research Consortium has funded studies in Guelph, Ohio and Iowa last year, and this year they added Nebraska. We did Nebraska this spring.
We do not have the chemical analysis results back yet, but we can tell you two anecdotal things we saw. One is during the planting period, the first part was cool and wet and the second part got sunny and dry. There was dust blowing around, but we had traps out in front of the colonies to see if we got any excess bee deaths from the migration of the planting dust blowing off of the fields. Any residue on the seeds was blowing out of the drills that they were using, and we saw no observable effect at all in terms of bee mortality, even during the heavy dust periods. I don't have the chemical analysis results back yet.
We did see a bee kill at two sites, but the bee kill occurred two weeks before the corn was planted. So if you were a beekeeper who had dropped beehives on this field, left them and came back after the planting, you would have seen dead bees on the ground and dead bees in the bottom of the hive and said there was a kill because of the corn dust. But in fact during the corn planting period, we saw no effect at all.
Mr. Henderson: If I may add to that, there is a broad diversity of opinion in the American research. If you read the press you can see that this is still quite a contentious issue. Even our colleagues who are trying to draw different conclusions from the effects of neonicotinoids on insects, who have done similar longitudinal studies for other purposes, have amassed a large number samples wherein they found little or no neonicotinoid pesticide in their samples. So the one consistency we have is the low prevalence of neonicotinoids taken up or present. They sampled bee colonies and we sampled field exposure. They found very few neonicotinoids in bee colonies.
As for directions they're going, there are two concerns I'm aware of, some of which we are starting to investigate. One would be a longitudinal study about chronic, repeated exposures of honeybees in environmental situations and what effects those might be. With that, do we have cumulative exposures at low levels producing any effects?
We have undertaken studies to that effect to work with low-level exposures over long periods of time. Those data, I think, are forthcoming. Those studies obviously have to be conducted over a long period of time, and we know of other colleagues investigating that with what we would call sublethal, long-term exposures to see if there are cumulative effects.
Mirroring what Jerry just said, an issue that's arising is the effects of direct exposure to these pesticides and different agricultural practices. Jerry alluded to the fact that we've observed significant unintended bee kills as a result of cover crops in no-till planting in northern Minnesota where early blooming crops attracted bees into fields being drilled by corn, so the bees were exposed by direct mechanism. I think application, agricultural practices and direct exposure are areas that need to be explored further, as opposed to indirect exposure that we've looked at extensively in food source pollen and nectar.
Senator Robichaud: If I understand correctly, in your research you could say that the pesticides in what you looked at, the different fields, the different levels, had no effect on bee health.
Mr. Henderson: Yes, that is true.
Mr. Bromenshenk: Yes.
Senator Robichaud: That's all I wanted to know. Thank you.
[Translation]
Senator Maltais: So the pesticides that have been studied in your fields are not harmful to bees. Have you noticed a higher mortality rate in the bees in the fields you have studied compared to other fields in the United States, with grasses and fruit such as blueberries or pears, for example, or anything that needs to be pollinated? Is the mortality rate lower than in other fields in the United States?
[English]
Mr. Bromenshenk: We studied the two crops that the Environmental Protection Agency bases its decisions on because of the magnitude of those crops, the risk posed by how common those crops are and how much area they cover. That's corn, and coming on is canola because that's where a major use of this seed treatment is done.
Mr. Henderson: Also because there has been the notion among American beekeepers that corn is very hard on bee colonies. Migratory beekeepers in the United States travelling between the West Coast and East Coast often will bring bee colonies into corn during the tasselling period in hopes that additional pollen would improve growth of colonies that have suffered from travel and other activities. They observed significant bee losses, so corn was an important issue to study. It appeared to be an area, a place, a crop that was particularly hard on honeybees. That is why we were studying it.
[Translation]
Senator Maltais: Could you tell us again that the chemical products being used have no effect on the bees' mortality rate? Was that your answer earlier?
[English]
Mr. Bromenshenk: Our statement was that we looked at two of the most commonly used neonicotinoid pesticides, imidacloprid and clothianidin, and we looked at them on two of the crops where there is the greatest concern in the United States for risk to bees, particularly corn. We looked at them during the period of time when these crops were in bloom. That's the data we reported. We have looked at clothianidin used in Nebraska during the planting period, but we do not have a full data set back.
What we did not see was evidence of any acute toxicity that would be evidenced by things such as dead bees in traps. We didn't see any observable changes in the colony viability in the Nebraska study, for example, that we just finished. We came out the other end. All of the queens were still in place. The colonies were actually gaining weight. In the melon studies, the colonies were struggling because there just wasn't enough food in those tents, but we still didn't lose any colonies.
Mr. Henderson: Is that sufficient, sir?
Senator Maltais: Thank you.
Senator Ogilvie: Thank you, gentlemen. It's really nice to have testimony on studies that are actually carried out in a focused way, using completely scientific methods to approach a distinct question. That has been unique in the testimony before us because much of the testimony has dealt with the total condition of the bees and described the overwintering losses in bee colonies, whereas you have focused on one specific aspect, that is, during the bloom of the plants.
For absolute clarity in terms of the scientific study, who was the sponsor of the study on the canola and the corn fields?
Mr. Henderson: That was Bayer CropScience.
Senator Ogilvie: Neither of you have any financial interest in Bayer CropScience?
Mr. Henderson: No, other than the grant money that supported the study.
Senator Ogilvie: Right, no stake in the companies. As you would understand, in this area, this is a very important set of data that you have given, and I wanted to have on the record that these were free from any personal kind of influence.
I wish that you would extend your studies to look at the total 12-month study of bees overwintering and bring the same scientific approach. I think that would be enormously helpful, but thank you very much for a very clear and well- presented study.
Mr. Henderson: You're welcome.
Mr. Bromenshenk: If I might make a comment, as to the overwintering problem, there are a couple of issues here. One is that we're not saying that pesticides, especially over long periods of time, if residues build up in colonies or if colonies are weakened by exposure to pesticides, might not have other ramifications, such as susceptibility to pests and diseases.
We have done a considerable amount of work on honeybee health in terms of pathogens in bee colonies, and we have looked a lot at varroa mites and tracheal mites and, more recently, at what is technically called a microsporidian. You and I would call it a fungus. This fungus is Nosema ceranae, and the research community is divided. One group says it is not a problem and the other group says it is. We have published our results that suggest that a combination of Nosema ceranae and viruses can be a lethal punch to bees, particularly in cool, damp overwintering periods.
We have seen samples from two years ago — it might be three years ago now, but I believe it was two years ago — in the Peace River area, where a variety of beekeepers keep their colonies in massive sheds. Some of them had almost total losses in the sheds. When we looked at those colonies, they had really heavy loads of this fungus. I have investigated supposed bee kills from dust during the planting period. Don't get me wrong; there are some that occur. If you have poison in dust and the bees get a lot of it, you can get a problem. There is a technical fix to that. They're working on better stickers and better drills to hold the emissions down. I'm not saying that there aren't some legitimate reports in the U.S. I can't speak to the Canadian ones because I haven't seen any Canadian ones. I wasn't there on the ground. In the U.S, there are some legitimate beekeeper reports of spring planting problems on some sites on the day when it was hot and dusty and the bees got a heavy exposure. Some colonies got affected.
I also investigated a scenario in which a well-known U.S. beekeeper got national news coverage for a kill supposedly in the spring, during planting. We showed up, and the first curious part was that there was rain. The second curious part was that some of the closest fields hadn't even been planted.
To you and to anyone looking at this overwintering problem and losses in the spring, I used to say — and I've been doing this for 40 years and have seen all of the pesticides used over the last 40 years, some of which produced piles of dead bees out front — if you have piles of dead bees in front of the colony, it's a pesticide. I no longer say that because with the combination of mites and Nosema and going from a couple of viruses that we knew about to almost 30 viruses in bees, under those stress times, those pathogens can build up. You have to sample and look for the pathogens because in the supposed bee kill that I investigated — and the beekeeper still vehemently disagrees with me — of 30- some samples, only two had any detectable pesticide at all. But they had huge levels of the fungus and of the mites. I know you have problems in Canada, but if you go out and grab a sample and only look at pesticides, you may be missing what's actually going on there. It's possible that it's a combination of the two, but you can no longer investigate these kills by only looking at one side of the equation.
Senator Enverga: Thank you for the presentation. It's amazing to know that neonicotinoids don't really kill the bees from your report. The two of you have co-authored a paper showing that the iridovirus virus, combined with Nosema, is a further stressor. Have you found this to be present in your studies?
Mr. Henderson: In the studies that we summarized for you, we were not funded to look for pathogens. In our original work, we sampled over 200 migratory colonies, if I recall correctly, through California and the Southeast and the Midwest. We have not followed up in field studies, but what we have done with the two pathogens is re-infection studies to prove that we can actually kill colonies with the combination. That work is just concluding, and we hope to have it published. We did closed environmental trials with small-size colonies, infecting them to see if this combination of pathogens is lethal.
With regard to the pathogenicity, Mr. Bromenshenk was correct: A number of pathogens, not just these two, are significant stressors to honeybees.
Senator Enverga: I understand that you have tested it on different fields. Are you using the same type of bees that are widespread all over North America?
Mr. Bromenshenk: There is only one species of bee used for pollination that comes from Europe, which is Apis mellifera, the European honeybee. In the very southern states, we have a different subspecies or race that has invaded some areas, which is the Africanized bee. The honeybee is not native to North America. It came to us from Europe. It was brought by the early colonists. It is the one used all across North America for pollination. It's the same species.
Senator Oh: Gentlemen, you both are co-owners of Bee Alert Technology. The committee has heard from previous witnesses about DriftWatch, a GPS program that allows beekeepers to share information with farmers about the location of their hives. What innovative tools has Bee Alert Technology developed to allow the beekeepers to better manage their colonies?
Mr. Bromenshenk: That's an interesting question. I just finished my tenure as President of the Western Apiculture Society. We had the national annual conference of Western Apiculture Society in Missoula, Montana, September 17 to 20. As part of that, we hosted the second international workshop on bee and hive monitoring.
Through our military work, since 1995, we have had the capability of monitoring all kinds of variables inside of distant hives. We actually had 50-some colonies wired for weight, for counting bees that came and went, for temperature and for humidity, with full weather stations, around toxic waste sites. Out of that, we patented the very first electronic hives for remote monitoring. We had been frustrated in seeing those tools come into the marketplace simply because the enabling technologies, the computers and processors, were too expensive or had too much power draw.
About two years ago, there was a radical shift worldwide, and we now can buy credit-card-sized computers that are very inexpensive, very powerful and are programmed using conventional programs. With those, not only we but two years ago I think we identified about eight companies in the world that were trying to bring electronic hives into the scenario of being able to place sentinel colonies. If you had a pesticide kill, you would see it reflected and you'd get a report to your phone that it happened and where it happened. We're not relying on the beekeeper to report it, but the colony would call you and tell you that there was a problem. We went from about eight companies that were fledgling two years ago to over thirty that we identified currently around the world. We had a good cross-section of those in Missoula, several of which were presenting actual data from electronic hives being used for pesticide studies and other purposes.
We're bringing our own product into the marketplace. We're aimed more at the commercial beekeeper who has not only the problem with detecting a pesticide incident — it happens, but the beekeeper is 100, 200, 500 miles away and doesn't know what happened, so a sentinel system would be great for that — but also for research on what's really going on inside of these colonies, whether they're exposed to pesticides or pathogens.
One, we are a leader in terms of bringing this to market. At the moment, we are beta testing pallet-sized systems for commercial beekeepers, and we are partnering with a company out of Europe that had a similar system for backyard beekeepers.
Secondly, we patented and developed the use of bee sounds for the detection of mites, diseases and toxic chemicals. That was originally funded by the U.S. Department of the Army, who wanted a canary. In other words, if a terrorist released a cloud of poison gas, Homeland Security and the army wanted to detect it in a hurry, and they wanted something disposable, so we went to the canary model but we used honeybees. The quickest way we can tell that a colony is exposed to a poisonous chemical is to use the sound shift. They change their sounds. Every beekeeper knows that you can hear a colony that's lost its queen simply because it starts to make a drumming sound.
A gentleman by the name of Eddie Woods in Britain patented and evolved a simple bandpass frequency detector way back 20 or 30 years ago now. More recently, an engineer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory developed a sound system to detect a bee, put it in a capsule, and its wing beat sound is different if it's an African bee versus a European bee. He thought he had a cheap way of detecting European bees from the more aggressive supposed killer bee that we hear about.
We took it much further. First, we found that we could detect releases of toxic chemicals within a minute — not say a half hour or hour, but sometimes within one to two minutes. From that, we said we don't want a false positive and get all excited that there's something poisonous out here if it's simply a sick bee colony. So we had a USDA small business innovation grant to our company, through which we developed a hand-held scanner that takes a sound clip, records it and then gives you the probability that that colony is healthy or that it might have mites. If it has mites, which mites might it have and at what levels? Does it have a queen? Is it showing signs of Nosema? Is it showing signs of the CCD? We have been beta testing that in the U.S., New Zealand and Australia for the last two years. We've actually got it out in the hands of beekeepers.
This year, we have a new award to our company from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The goal here is to see if we can use the sounds that bee colonies produce to give us a first alert or alarm of bees being exposed to neonicotinoid pesticides. Microphones are relatively cheap. We could plug these into our electronic hives. If anything happened to bee colonies in areas at high risk, they would simply send you a message and tell you that they've been exposed to something. We hopefully can tell the exposure based on sound.
Dr. Henderson looked at the sound profiles for neonicotinoid pesticide because we're just putting together a progress report for USDA.
Mr. Henderson: With regard to neonicotinoids, we make a sonic fingerprint of the honeybee colony and are able to distinguish between chronic or acute exposure, that is, low levels over a long period of time or a high doze over a short period of time. They produce a different fingerprint. The device we have detects that and reports it.
Other technology we have brought to bear is the ability for satellite up-link of data reporting from our automatic or electronic hive base, because many beekeepers don't work within range of cellphone technology. We've had for several years an inexpensive satellite communications early warning system.
Bee theft was a big problem in California. Whole truckloads of bees would disappear, so we used microchip technology to detect movement of colonies. If colonies moved a certain number of metres away from their location, it would send a satellite phone message to the beekeeper so he could know his colonies were being stolen.
Our big research breakthrough, not so much commercial, is the fact that we developed LIDAR, a laser instrument capable of mapping bee distribution over their habitat. We are starting to use that now in agricultural settings to see how bees forage with the notion that we can make more efficient the placement of colonies in pollinating circumstances. With that, we have an automated training system where we can actually practice directed pollination. We've done that with onions. We are exploring it with carrots and kiwi fruits this year to see if we can direct pollinators more exclusively into certain agriculture areas. Those are the technological innovations we're bringing.
For beekeepers, the most important tools are the acoustic diagnostic tool we have and the electronic hive, the remote monitoring situation.
Mr. Bromenshenk: This LIDAR system was originally pioneered by us because, if we can train bees to find land mines, no one is going to walk across a mine field to see where the bees are. We had to have a way of mapping where bees were going, and accurately, because the people using the map want to know where to dig.
The LIDAR systems we now have weigh about 35 pounds. You can pick them up and carry them around. You can roll them onto a plane. You can move them around readily. They are robust and rugged. They will tell us down to a few centimetres where each bee that they detect is at over a field.
That gives a lot of options for some really new research. For example, if bees are near an area where you think you've got a pesticide problem and it recurs, you could set the LIDAR system down, put the bees down and actually see whether the bees are using those fields or what part of the fields they are using. We can then learn much more about where bees go when they're foraging and we could use that to help protect bee health if we understand that.
Senator Beyak: Thank you, gentlemen, for your knowledge. This is very interesting today.
If the pesticides were not killing the bees, I wondered what your opinion would be with 40 years' experience. You answered Senator Ogilvie's supplemental question, but would you also tell me whether in your 40 years you have seen a disappearance of colonies to this magnitude over a sustained number of years? I know we have new issues now with the varroa mites, Nosema and we thought pesticides. Was there anything in the past that had this magnitude?
Mr. Bromenshenk: Absolutely. In the mid-1970s they had just as many states affected that had a symptomology that looked like the CCD. It was called disappearing disease. I observed it and witnessed it at that time. As far as I'm concerned, what we saw in 2006 was a recurrence of something we had seen before. It got a lot more media attention and so the media became aware of it, but for two or three years in the 1970s we had a tremendous problem with this as it affected large areas. At the time, a bee researcher from USDA tracked a lot of the failing colonies, which were in our northern states, including Montana, the Dakotas and Wyoming. He tracked down the queen stocks as coming from breeders that were using stock that came from an experiment conducted by some of our universities and one of our USDA labs. They brought in sperm from Africanized bees, developed a hybrid, tested them on an island and said they got rid of the nasty temperament and this will be a great bee, and it appears that that bee just wouldn't winter properly. He thought there was a genetic defect. Now we know that another possibility might be traceable to those stocks that all went back to that source, and that is that some of these diseases can transfer through the queen or through the sperm.
Maybe he was right about the introduction, but maybe it was one of the first pathogens we put in.
As far as the old pesticides go, I teach an online course and one of the things I do is require everybody to get a 1990s book written by the three men who tested more pesticides in the United States than anyone else and spent their careers at it. It is called Pollinator Protection and it has now, because of our class, been put back into print and is available as an electronic and as a paper version. The book talks about all the different things they saw with pesticides. It talks about how to minimize pesticide events and how to protect your bees from moving them to covering them and so on. But it also defines what they call a bee kill, which is very illuminating because a bee colony has a queen that can lay 1,000 to 3,000 eggs a day. That means that population grows during the summer season by 1,000 to 3,000 individuals a day. Well, if something didn't happen to those individuals, you would be overrun by bees. They have about a two-week life span when they're foraging. Every day that means somewhere around 1,000 to 3,000 bees have to die just to keep things in balance. You always expect to see a few scattered bees in front of even the healthiest of bee colonies.
We had about a 95 per cent return rate each day, but then 5 per cent of them disappeared every day. Some got hit by windshields and some fell out of the air, some die of old age and some are sick.
If we look at the old thing, they had 100 dead bees in front were still okay, but when they started getting up to hundreds of thousands of bees in front they called it a kill.
What I see from my 40 years is now somebody sees five dead bees in front of a bee colony and goes on the national news saying you've got a bee kill. Our definition of a kill has changed.
That's not to say that there aren't other pesticides out there that cause problems or that a dust incident couldn't cause piles of dead bees. I still see the occasional pile of dead bees and some of those are pesticides, but most of those are because somebody screwed up in the application.
I fear that we don't want to simply go for what looks like ''if applied and used properly''; that is, the seed treatment with a very small amount of chemical that dissipates by the time the plant grows. I really don't want to see us have to back to the ones where I saw inches of dead bees in front, and that's what I fear is going to happen.
Mr. Henderson: I want to add that in the past we'd see catastrophic losses where a colony or set of colonies would disappear. Now it seems to be common that beekeepers will tolerate 20 per cent to 25 per cent loss of colonies on an annual basis. On an average basis that is a much more significant loss rate of bee colonies that we're seeing.
One of the reasons we think that may be happening in the United States is the consolidation of beekeeping from small- and mid-sized beekeepers to very large beekeepers that are migratory. They travel thousands of miles to colonies. We joke that a bee colony evolved to live in a tree trunk and never move through its entire existence. Now we put them in a box, put them on a semi-tractor, haul them 3,000 miles every week, and that has to take a toll. From an epidemiological standpoint, a colony moving from location to location is going to encounter many more disease situations on top of the physiological stress. The combination of chemical exposures, pathogen exposures and just the stress of moving has to have had a huge toll on beekeeping in terms of losses.
Mr. Bromenshenk: I agree with him.
Senator Robichaud: In your study you mentioned two neonic seed treatments, which are clothianidin and imidacloprid. What about the third active neonic, which is thiamethoxam? Is that different or is it just another name for the same active agent?
Mr. Henderson: Thiamethoxam is a product that I believe — and Jerry will correct me if I'm wrong — when it is biologically metabolized breaks into clothianidin. It is a complex compound that becomes clothianidin in the insect when the insect begins to metabolize it, so it is essentially clothianidin.
Senator Robichaud: Why would they differentiate that when they say there are three seed treatments?
Mr. Bromenshenk: We did the analysis of looking for breakdowns, and in the particular area we were looking at, they used the clothianidin product.
We've also done work with thiamethoxam, and it breaks down in the same way imidacloprid breaks down into three other products. But the breakdown products we saw were figured into the total concentrations that are used here. We have taken those into consideration.
Mr. Henderson: For what it's worth, thiamethoxam and clothianidin are different manufacturers' labels for the same product.
Senator Robichaud: That's why you didn't look at it. Thank you.
The Chair: Honourable senators, I wish to thank the witnesses very much for sharing their expertise, their scientific knowledge and also for sharing their research with the Standing Senate Committee on Agriculture and Forestry. If they want to add any other comments, they should not hesitate to contact our clerk.
Honourable senators, we will now go in camera to address another order of reference.
(The committee continued in camera.)