Roundup Harms Bees

I wonder what took them so long to figure this out. 9/10 killed when exposed to glyphosate.

https://nypost.com/video/weed-killer...-bee-genocide/

I think the research is pretty interesting, but I do have some critiques which keep it out of "true" categoru for me.

1) They used advanced statistics with no qualified statistician. This is a common problem which often leads to erroneous analysis and / or interpretation.

2) the article they reference to justify their use of particular doses has 0 experimental data to back up their claim. This should have been caught during review, so the review on this was somewhat sloppy.

The good: data and supplemental material were apparently archived, although I didn't check further.

Pretty intetesting, all in all.

The paper.

http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2018/09/18/1803880115

I believe in science and technology, obviously, but I also believe in the eye test.

Did you know that Frank Lloyd Wright's initial calculations for the steel needed in the cantilever for Falling Water called for 50% less than what is there? The builder didn't feel it passed the eye test and doubled the size of the beams. It's still sinking despite the "over build."

It is with this in mind that I say that obviously Roundup is harmful to the environment. The idea that we could produce a catch-all weedkiller produced by a gigantic corporation that has no downstream effects on other flora and fauna is completely laughable. Take two seconds to think about it and Roundup fails the eye test spectacularly.

Sadly though, like with flame retardation standards, the books will be cooked, the results will be skewed, and a company with pockets that large will simply rebrand with another product that will hit the market before adequate testing is done, and we'll have a whole different crisis on our hands in 15 years when the science finally comes around to realizing that obviously this new indiscriminate killing machine is harmful to the environment as well.

I'm not a farmer or scientist, but I live in farm country, own a couple farms and have read a lot about the potential problems with disappearing bee populations. Grant it, Round up isn't good for bees directly exposed to it, but I would contend that the lack of bees is more due to the monoculture created by modern row crop farming.

Huge fields and expanses of weed free corn, beans and wheat which don't serve much use to the bees, plus the majority of the areas that held plant life the bees need has been removed; forests, fence rows, swamps, ditches, roadsides, etc. Heck, in big AG country you don't even see too much hay ground or pasture anymore, it's road to road row crops.

And don't let the homeowners off the hook either, who spray their yards with 2-4-d to kill all the clovers and dandelions so they have nothing but green grass.

what ever happened to just pulling the weeds out of the ground!!! haha

Last sidewalk I weeded to about exactly an hour to 100% clean up about 50'. Really not that hard. Just do it. Probably takes longer to go to the store, buy the round up, then clean up all the dead weeds.

Have a good customer who was high up in the company @Monsanto in the 60's and 70's. He said at one of the meetings with all the marketing mgrs, sales mgrs, they were trying to come up with a name for this new herbicide.

He said one of the VP's for marketing, who said she had just returned from her honeymoon, raised her hand and said "How about Ramrod?"

True story.

When I was a little kid, my mother told me she would give me 10 cents for each dandelion that I pulled out of the front yard while she went shopping. Looked like there were maybe a few dozen.

By the time she got back, I had over 200 in my basket and thought I was rich!

You don't get out of the concrete jungle very often, do you?

Fishindude got it mostly right IMO. RU itself doesn't kill bees. Insecticide treated crop seed does more to kill polinators (not just bees) than any herbicide. Herbicides are sprayed to kill weeds, not kill insects.

BTW, you guys do realize, glysophte (main ingredient in RU) is a form of salt, right?


Did you know that glysophate is labeled for killing aquatic weeds in ponds & other water sources? No harm to fish either.

Dog chow is a form of food, but I don’t eat it.


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Oh, are we back to the myth that bees are on their way out or in danger?

don't bee like that.

Talk about inspiration.

Good comments and maybe there are clues here, but the problems need to be verified properly.

...



https://www.france24.com/en/20180427...nt-food-safety

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/201...-killing-bees/

Very similar to quail populations in farm country. Lack of habitat leads to lower #'s.

The NRCS is actually putting a lot of effort & monies into helping the polinators & incentivizing landowners to increase pollinator habitat. Matter of fact, we've signed up to start several pollinator plantings on our farm.

I've also got several friends who are bee keepers & do plantings for the bees on their properties to increase honey production.

the use of roundup has skyrocketed, the statistics on it are astounding. Along with its huge increase in use has been a huge increase in weeds that are roundup resistant requiring ever increasing amounts of roundup to keep down the weeds.

Don't know how bad it is on bees but let's all hope it turns out it's not too hard on people because by now probably all of us have some in our system.

Anyone wanna come pull my fenceline? Weed whacking it takes several hours....

Funny how quickly people are going to condemn things they don't have to use.

....and vice versa.