I hadn’t known about this:
Researchers are making headway in mapping the genes that help bees overcome these obstacles, including which genes help them safely break down pesticides. Now researchers have identified several compounds that help turn on those genes. They’re present in honey, something commercial bees don’t get to keep–their food supply is taken for human use, and bees are feed sweet substitutes like corn syrup.
Wenfu Mao and colleagues found three compounds in honey that increase the expression of a gene that helps bees metabolize pesticides. The most important chemical is something called p-coumaric acid, which is found in pollen cells. By eating honey, which contains pollen, the bees are exposed to a compound that basically boosts their ability to break down dangerous chemicals. So honey substitutes like high-fructose corn syrup may compromise their health.
You don’t say. Corn syrup isn’t good for anyone. No reason to think it would keep a bee healthy, but apparently the industry fooled themselves into thinking so.
Now that they understand this, maybe there’s something they can do about it, and still harvest honey.
It use to be standard practice to leave part of the honey for the hive to consume. You only fed the bees sugar water during the winter to keep the hive alive.
Alternatively, this might not hold up any better than “cell phones” as The Reason.
It makes me suspicious any time research concludes that “Bad-X is due to a pet bugaboo”.
HFCS is a pet bugaboo.
(Plus, if they’re right, a simple additive fixes the problem – the problem not being “HFCS is bad!!” but “bees need p-coumaric acid”.
The other problem is that the research, from reading the synopsis, doesn’t actually look at real bees in affected colonies to see if they lacked it, or how they specifically acquired it in their life-cycle.
The acid in question is in the pollen that they collect, after all, not in the nectar turned into honey; replacing the honey with corn syrup does not obviously keep them from ingesting pollen.
There’s a reason that the study is couched in the most tentative of “may” language.
Don’t apply the naturalistic fallacy or simply assert “corn syrup isn’t good for anyone”, rather than the more defensible “sugar in general isn’t especially good for humans in large quantities”.
That is not science.)
It’s not invoking the naturalistic fallacy to point out that, since corn syrup is not a natural product, it’s unlikely that there are any existing organism that would thrive on it without evolving at least somewhat to do so.
“…their food supply is taken for human use, and bees are feed sweet substitutes like corn syrup.”
I’m not going to say this doesn’t happen, but it’s gonna be a dumb beekeeper who does it. I just finished taking a Beekeeping Course, after reading about beekeeping for years, and any good beekeeper is leaving honey FOR the bees to keep them healthy! Given the problem with Colony Collapse Disorder, it seems ‘stupider’ than just plain monetarily stupid to take the honey and feed the bees something that doesn’t give them the antibodies they need.
Granted the cause of CCD hasn’t been defined yet, but if it is bacterial or viral, the bees need their minimal share of the honey just that much more. But to blame CCD on the bees being fed ‘substitutes’ is foolish I think. People who study wild bees are at odds over CCD existing in the wild population. Some researchers have had colonies disappear and have said it was from CCD. I’m a new beekeeper, so I don’t have all the answers.
But I do know that beekeepers in my area who are NOT feeding substitutes HAVE lost bees.
IIRC, you wil have some die off every winter regardless of CCD.
It is hard to get good info on honey because there is too much marketing going on to “green” people.
Free enterprise wins again. Some will leave some honey, others will completely substitute corn syrup. This is how it is suppose to work. Bad practices are weeded out by the power of economics even if it doesn’t seem so short term.
Unless we let our ‘leaders’ screw that up with some laws. Transparency and competition is the best policy.
A. It’s unlikely that HFCS is significantly related to the honeybee problems because the HFCS subsitution has probably been occurring for many decades and the die-off is recent.
B. Somebody desperately needs to leave comments on the original article under the pseudonym “Winnie the Poo.”
He’s busy with Inspiration Mars planning.
There is nothing wrong with corn syrup, except that it costs more than cane sugar (on a global scale) and it doesn’t taste as good as cane sugar.
It is a product which exists solely because of protectionist tariffs.