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The United States has lost more than 40% of its bee colonies this past year according to a new national survey. Oklahoma, Illinois, Iowa, Delaware, Maryland, Pennsylvania, Maine and Wisconsin all saw more than 60 percent of their hives die since April 2014, according to the survey.

There can be no doubt that modern agriculture with its emphasis on GMOs and chemicals is a huge part of the problem. Dr. Don Huber has shown a connection between glyphosate, the active ingredient in the world’s most common pesticide, Roundup, and bee colony losses. (See: Is glyphosate a contributing cause of bee colony collapse disorder?)

Honeybees dying, situation ‘unheard of’

By Justin Wm. Moyer

The Washington Post

Excerpts:

Just last year, it seemed there was something to celebrate despite planet Earth’s ongoing honeybee apocalypse: Bee colony losses were down. Not by enough, but they were down.

“One year does not make a trend,” Jeff Pettis, a co-author of the survey who heads the federal government’s bee research laboratory in Beltsville, Md., told the New York Times.

Turns out Pettis was right. VanEngelsdorp and other researchers at the Bee Informed Partnership, affiliated with the Department of Agriculture, just announced more than 40 percent of honeybee hives died this past year, as the Associated Press reported. The number is preliminary, but is the second-highest annual loss recorded to date.

“What we’re seeing with this bee problem is just a loud signal that there’s some bad things happening with our agro-ecosystems,” study co-author Keith Delaplane of the University of Georgia told the AP. “We just happen to notice it with the honeybee because they are so easy to count.”

Read the Full Article Here.

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