For the second time in two years, Gildardo Urrego is scooping up piles of dead bees after an invisible evil invaded his hives in northwest Colombia, wreaking havoc among his swarms.
Urrego has no proof, but he suspects the culprit is pesticides that have been fueling a commercial avocado and citrus boom in the country.
Hundreds of hives have been killed off in Colombia in the past few years, and some investigations have pointed to fipronil, an insecticide banned for use on crops in Europe and restricted in the US and China.
Photo: AFP
It is used to control all manner of insects and has been blamed for several bee massacres worldwide.
Urrego’s apiary in Colombia’s Antioquia Department produces honey flavored with pollen from nearby passion fruit orchards. In 2019, he lost 10 of his 19 hives.
This time, he said, one-third of his 12 hives were wiped out — a loss of about 160,000 of the industrious little pollinators.
“There is a theory that, yes, this is due to poisoning, there are some crops around here that perhaps have not managed their agrochemicals well, and so this area was affected,” he said.
In the past few years, bees in North America, Europe, Russia, South America and elsewhere have started dying off from “colony collapse disorder,” a mysterious scourge blamed partly on pesticides along with mites, viruses and fungi.
The UN said that nearly half of insect pollinators, particularly bees and butterflies, risk global extinction.
About 1.4 billion jobs and three-quarters of all crops around the world depend on pollinators, mainly bees, which provide free fertilization services worth billions of dollars, a 2016 study said.
About 300km south of Antioquia, in the Quindio Department, Abdon Salazar has no qualms pointing the finger at fipronil as he counts his losses.
“Over the last two years, we have calculated more than 80 million dead bees,” he said as he walked among the 300 vibrating hives of his business Apicola Oro. “We are talking some 800 hives, 100,000 bees per hive, it is a very large quantity, an alarming quantity.”
Salazar and other beekeepers in the region are increasingly having to clear out mounds of dead bees from their apiaries which are surrounded by avocado and citrus plantations in an exceptionally fertile and biodiverse part of the world.
In Quindio, hive collapse has coincided with the expansion of monoculture in recent decades, said Faber Sabogal, president of the Asoproabejas beekeepers’ organization.
According to the local government, five multinational companies bought large tracts of land in the region between 2016 and 2019 to profit from the growing global appetite for Hass avocados.
Exports skyrocketed from 1.5 tonnes in 2014 to 40.4 tonnes in 2019, and this year, Colombia became the largest supplier of the creamy, green delicacy to Europe.
However, bees are the collateral damage, becoming contaminated as they buzz through pesticide-treated plantations looking for food, beekeepers say.
“They bring this poison to the hive and kill everyone else,” Salazar said.
Asoproabejas members have videotaped dozens of mass bee die-offs in several regions of Colombia, mainly in the west.
Last year, the state-owned Colombian Agricultural Institute (ICA) was notified by beekeepers of 256 suspected hive poisonings in Quindio alone. About 10 million insects were lost.
ICA regional manager Jorge Garcia said the body examined samples from six apiaries and found that “the fipronil molecule is one of the causes of mortality.”
The alert was raised with ICA headquarters in Bogota, which is working on a suspension order, he said.
Withdrawing the poison altogether has been difficult, “because the companies producing agrochemicals will be affected economically,” Salazar said.
Maria Latorre, spokeswoman for Colombia’s agrochemical union, said that a fipronil ban would provoke “a very negative situation for the productive structure” of the 33 crops that rely on it.
The body denies that fipronil is harmful to bees, but said that it would welcome a “review” of its use “on crops that have had incidents.”
However, Fernando Montoya of the Colombian Hortofruticola Association, which represents crop growers, said the chemical could be replaced by “mushroom-based bioproducts,” insect traps and manual pest removal.
SUPPLY HICCUPS: Poor manufacturing yields at Apple’s overseas suppliers have caused at least one maker of its new MiniLED displays to pause production, sources said The next-generation display destined to be a highlight of Apple Inc’s upcoming top-tier iPad Pro is facing production issues that could lead to short initial supplies of the new device, people familiar with the matter said. The Cupertino, California-based tech giant plans to showcase a new MiniLED display technology in the 12.9-inch iPad Pro set to be announced as early as the second half of this month. However, the firm’s overseas suppliers are dealing with poor manufacturing yields, the people who asked not to be named discussing sensitive matters said. At least one of the MiniLED makers has had to pause production as
RETAIL BANKING EXIT: Clients are concerned whether their rights would be protected, while employees were caught by surprise as the bank had just upgraded its services Citibank Taiwan Ltd (花旗台灣) yesterday said that credit card clients could continue using their cards as operations would continue normally until it sells its consumer banking business. As of February, the bank had 2.86 million credit cards in circulation in Taiwan, of which 2.17 million had been used in the past six months, ranking it sixth among all banks, data from the Financial Supervisory Commission showed. Credit card spending by Citibank clients totaled NT$15.66 billion (US$552.6 million) in February, also ranking sixth among banks in Taiwan. Citibank was the only foreign bank that made it into the top six. Customers should not
END OF AN ERA: The Boeing 747-400 jumbo jets have served the airline well, but new-generation aircraft are more fuel-efficient, CAL chairman Hsieh Shih-chien said China Airlines Ltd (CAL, 華航) yesterday bid farewell to its last four Boeing 747-400 planes, ending the era of the “Queen of the Skies” at the airline. CAL has since 1975 operated a total of 29 747 series aircraft manufactured by Boeing Co. In 1990, it started receiving delivery of 19 747-400 jumbo jets, with the last one, the B-18215, delivered in 2005, it said. The B-18215 was the last of the passenger model produced by Boeing, making the 16-year-old aircraft the world’s youngest 747-400, CAL chairman Hsieh Shih-chien (謝世謙) told an event to bid farewell to the planes at Taiwan Taoyuan
DIVERSE SUPPLY: TSMC chairman Mark Liu said the firm’s US$12 billion investment in Arizona would succeed with continued bipartisan support from the US Congress Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), the world’s largest contract chipmaker, on Monday took part in a virtual White House summit about a global semiconductor shortage and Washington’s plans to strengthen US supply chains. The Hsinchu-based company was among 19 firms, including fellow chipmakers Samsung Electronics Co, GlobalFoundries Inc and Intel Corp, that attended the summit hosted by US National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, US National Economic Council Director Brian Deese and US Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo. US President Joe Biden told executives in the meeting that there is bipartisan support in the US Congress for efforts to strengthen the US
RSS