Buying organic food is among the actions people can take to curb the global decline in insects, according to leading scientists. Urging political action to slash pesticide use on conventional farms is another, say environmentalists.
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Something catastrophically wrong happened in 2018 to monarch butterflies. Idaho wildlife biologist Ross Winton spent years working with monarch butterflies. With the help of volunteers, he would carefully put a tiny tag the size of a paper hole punch on about 30 to 50 of the iconic insects each summer in the Magic Valley.
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Researchers who work on GMO crops are developing special “artificial diet systems”. The stated purpose of these new diets is to standardise the testing of the Cry toxins, often used in GMO crops, for their effects on non-target species. But a paper published last month in the journal Toxins implies a very different interpretation of their purpose.
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Now that the federal government has reopened, it’s time to talk to your U.S. Representatives and Senators about what you’d like them to accomplish this year.
We hope you’ll put the Save America’s Pollinators Act at the top of your list.
If you’ve been following OCA’s Save the Bees campaign, you’ve seen the recent headlines.
The increasing use of pesticides is a ticking time bomb for all insects, including pollinators. Declining insect populations could soon have dire consequences, not just for insects but for all the animals and plants that rely on them—from insect-eating birds, shrews, lizards and frogs, to the 120 pollinated U.S. crops worth more than $15 billion annually.
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While soybean farmers watched the drift-prone weed killer dicamba ravage millions of acres of crops over the last two years, Arkansas beekeeper Richard Coy noticed a parallel disaster unfolding among the weeds near those fields. When Coy spotted the withering weeds, he realized why hives that produced 100 pounds of honey three summers ago now were managing barely half that: Dicamba probably had destroyed his bees’ food.
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Cape commercial bee farmers experienced a devastating revenue loss after thousands of bees were infected by a poison that left their hives ravaged. Many farmers initially did not know the cause, but tests carried out on bee samples revealed ant pesticides, lethally poisonous to bees, to be the culprit.
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When Susan Weller traveled to Ecuador to study tiger moths in the 1980s, she found plenty of insects. A decade later, Weller, now director of the University of Nebraska State Museum, returned to conduct follow-up research. But the moths she was looking for were gone.
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Use of glyphosate, a weed killer registered in 130 countries, has risen exponentially since the introduction of genetically engineered (GE) glyphosate-resistant crops. Between 1974 — the year glyphosate entered the U.S. market — and 2014, glyphosate use increased more than 250fold in the U.S. alone. Today, an estimated 300 million pounds are applied on U.S. farmland annually.
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Wasps may buzz, sting us and annoy us, but they’re far more useful than we realise. A new study in Ecological Entomology reveals both the overwhelmingly negative public perception of wasps and also their importance. Among the benefits is wasps’ pollination of flowers, helping Britain’s wildlife to blossom and supporting biodiversity.
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Herbalists talk a lot about their favourite medicines, menstrua and methods, but it is my unsolicited opinion that herbal honey doesn’t get near the attention it deserves. Over the last couple of months Jennifer Aikman has made medicinal herbal honeys with red elderflower, grand fir tips, nettles, wild rose, linden, lavender & yarrow, grindelia and pineapple weed.
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