Glyphosate and neonicotinoids are poisoning honeybees (and the world)

Honey bee on a flower, Argolis, Peloponnese, Greece. Photo: Evaggélos Vallianatos

Prologue

In the twentieth century, neurotoxins emerged in honeybees: organophosphate, carbamate and neonicotinoid pesticides. It also spawned glyphosate, a herbicide that gained global significance and is the best-selling pesticide ever. But where does this chemical come from? Rosemary Mason, a European physician, prolific science writer and environmentalist, has traced the toxic birth of glyphosate. By her 2021 Open letter to the head of the European Food Safety Authority’s pesticides unitshe explained how Monsanto created glyphosate. She said:

“Monsanto’s weed killer comes from underground. The active ingredient in Roundup is glyphosate, which is ultimately derived from elemental phosphorus mined from phosphate rock buried underground. Monsanto gets its phosphate from mines in southeastern Idaho, near the town of Soda Springs, a small community of about 3,000 people. The company has been active there since the 1950s. I visited there last summer (2020) and what I discovered was startling. I stood just behind a barbed wire fence at about 9 p.m. and watched as trucks dumped melted red piles of radioactive waste over the edge of what is quickly becoming a mountain of waste. This dumping occurred approximately every fifteen minutes and lit up the night sky. Horses grazed in a field just a few dozen feet away, glowing in the radiant rays emanating from the lava-like sludge. Rows of barley, for Budweiser beer, swayed in the distance.”

Glyphosate on the market, 1974

We don’t know when Monsanto discovered that phosphate rock would become its gold-mint weedkiller glyphosate. But we know that in 1974, Monsanto received the EPA’s blessing to start selling glyphosate to farmers. Billions of pounds of glyphosate have drenched America.

During my tenure at the US EPA, I was unaware whether glyphosate was tested by IBT, a large private laboratory that used false data in pesticide testing for decades. But glyphosate studies emerged from IBT. Other researchers ^{also say that glyphosate came from IBT’s house. The truth is that a cloud of suspicion and outright fraud in the agricultural sector has infected glyphosate and Monsanto, a subsidiary of German chemical and pharmaceutical giant Bayer. This history and Monsanto’s struggle for global dominance give glyphosate the attention of champions. It is the “active” ingredient of the popular Roundup weedkiller and the driving force behind Roundup Ready, genetically engineered crops designed to tolerate the killing power of glyphosate. Monsanto claims the best, almost harmless virtues, for its precious glyphosate products. Most international organizations, governments, agricultural universities and the agricultural industry love Monsanto. Glyphosate remains the powerhouse of plastic killers and GMOs worldwide.}

Biological warfare, glyphosate style

However, glyphosate causes enormous damage because it has been damaging the environment and human health in large quantities for decades. According to Don Huber, a chemical and biological warfare expert and professor emeritus of microbiology at Purdue University, glyphosate makes it difficult for crops to absorb micronutrients necessary for their health and nutrition. This means that honeybees suffer from collecting nectar and pollen from crops and wildflowers affected by glyphosate because they are deficient in those essential micronutrients. This is because glyphosate acts as a powerful antibiotic against these bacteria. Honey bees that eat nectar and pollen from flowers sprayed with glyphosate do not have these life-saving bacteria (lactobacillus and bifidobacterium). And without them, honey bees cannot digest the nectar they collect and the honey they make. They become disoriented while foraging.

Anthony Samsel, a research scientist and public health consultant, reminded me that glyphosate “causes Alzheimer’s disease in the honey bee, Apis mellifera. It destroys the creature’s memory, causing it to forget its way home. This probably also applies to the monarch butterfly!” Add neonicotinoid sprays to the broad harmful cloak of glyphosate covering Earth’s agricultural areas, and the honeybees are done. My beekeeper friend in Colorado is right. Neonicotinoids are simple nerve poisons. They also disorient the honeybees and kill them outright.

Entomologists warn that neonicotinoids are spreading around the world, polluting the environment, harming and killing beneficial insects and pollinators, and threatening ecosystems and food webs. They also suggested that unless we are careful and act in time and regulate or eliminate neonicotinoids, we will inevitably repeat the disastrous course of the world being contaminated by DDT, the ecocide that gave birth to Silent spring by Rachel Carson, 1962. More than fifty years after the EPA banned DDT in 1972, Americans and people around the world have detectable traces of DDT in their bodies. Birds like the California condor and peregrine falcon are just making a comeback after an almost certain DDT extinction. We must prevent this toxic history from repeating itself.

Ban glyphosate worldwide

This is a valuable lesson that we ignore at our peril. Neonicotinoids have become the new DDT for farmers. We must act quickly to break this addiction and prevent honey bee extinction. At the same time, we must be alert to the other gigantic danger: glyphosate. In Don Huber’s logic, glyphosate is just as terrible for honeybees as neonicotinoids. In the presence of glyphosate, “honey bees starve to death, even if there is enough honey and bee bread in the hive,” Huber says. Additionally, glyphosate disrupts honey bees’ hormones, meaning honey bees “never learn to forage efficiently.” “Put glyphosate and neonics (neonicotinoids) together in the environment, as we did, and the bees don’t stand a chance!” Huber wrote to me. Moreover, Huber is confident that the two microorganisms that glyphosate kills, lactobacillus and bifidobacterium, do more than help honey bees digest their food. They give honey bees “immunity against mites, foulbrood, viruses and stress”: “so with a very low drift of glyphosate,” says Huber, “you see all these (diseases) present because glyphosate is giving bees a serious case of ‘AIDS’, By which he means that glyphosate destroys their immune system.

Epilogue

Hubert is right. We need to ‘get rid’ of glyphosate. I would add neonicotinoids, and most pesticides deserve the same fate of removal. Pesticides are big business.

The pesticide industry is estimated at approximately $50 billion. About 80 percent of the 600 active ingredients are herbicides. “No wonder,” says Mason, “Bayer does not want to lose its license for glyphosate or for Clothianidin, a long-acting neonicotinoid insecticide that is very persistent in soil. Both chemicals are illegal on the market thanks to corrupt EU and US regulatory authorities.”

Mason also reminds us that the owner of Monsanto and glyphosate, Bayer, the German chemical and pharmaceutical giant company, is none other than the post-war continuation of IG Farben, the German chemical behemoth of World War II. Farben worked closely with the Nazi German state. It operated the Auschwitz concentration camp, where nerve agents killed hundreds of thousands of European Jews.

NOTES

1. Carol Van Strum, “Failure to Regulate: Pesticide Data Fraud Comes Home to Roost,” Truthout, April 9, 2015. ↑

2. I give a detailed account of IBT in my book, Poison Spring: The Secret History of Pollution and the EPA. ↑

3. SD Frank and TF Tooker, “Neonicotinoids pose undocumented threats to food webs,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, September 2, 2020. ↑