For related articles and more information, please visit OCA’s Genetic Engineering page, Millions Against Monsanto page and our Honey Bee Health page.

In the classic board game Clue, murder mysteries have clear solutions: say, Col. Mustard with the candlestick in the dining room. In the stark recent declines of honeybees and other pollinators, however, the situation is murkier.

We’ve put bees through a lot. They have to deal with nasty parasite, the varroa mite, which didn’t make its way to the United States until the late 1980s. They also have to deal with pesticides specifically designed to target those mites (called, yes, miticides). Over the winter, bees in commercial hives often live not on their own honey, as they have evolved to do, but rather a cheap substitute: high-fructose corn syrup. And finally, they are confronted with a range of pathogens.

Over the past month, the dossiers on two of those suspects got a little thicker. In the January issue of the peer-reviewed journal
Ecotoxicology, UK researchers delivered yet more evidence that a widely used pesticide class called neonicotinoids might play a decisive role in declining bee health. They fed one set of bumblebees pollen and sugar water containing very low levels a neonic called imidacloprid. The team let the dosed bees forage in a field and compared their pollen-gathering performance to those of an un-dosed control group.

The results: The imidacloprid-exposed bees were much worse at gathering pollen. They brought back pollen on 40 percent of their trips, vs. 63 percent for the control group. And when the dosed bees did manage to snag pollen, they brought back on average 31 percent less than their un-dosed peers.