[Ads-l] apian terms: neonic, miticide, clothianidin, pollinator, Dust Bowl, monocultural, flupyradifurone, colony collapse syndrome

[Ben Zimmer]

Oxford Dictionaries does in fact have both "Dust Bowl" and
"pollinator" (as a derivative of "pollinate").

http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/dust-bowl
http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/pollinate

Both are also in the OED, though "Dust Bowl" (under "dust") hasn't
been revised recently.

On Tue, Aug 18, 2015 at 2:43 PM, Benjamin Barrett wrote:
>
> "What Is Killing America's Bees and What Does It Mean for Us?"
> By Alex Morris
> http://rol.st/1NhLePm
>
> Here is a short list of words not in the Oxford Dictionary English
> dictionaries, including two not in Wiktionary, from the above Rolling
> Stones article.
>
> Not all that interesting, though their use in Rolling Stones gives them
> wide exposure. "Neonic" in particular may become better known given the
> importance of CCD.
>
> I haven't tried to find earlier citations.
>
> 1. neonic - not on Wiktionary/Oxford Dictionary site
>
> Doan never really considered the possibility that the fault might not be
> his own until scientists at Penn State who had been testing his bees
> told him of news coming out of France that pointed the finger at a
> relatively new class of insecticides called neonicotinoids, or neonics.
>
> That neonic insecticides can kill honeybees is not up for debate.
>
> A 2014 study in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry found
> that 90 percent of honey tested positive for at least one neonic, and 50
> percent contained at least two.
>
> 2. miticide - Wiktionary (https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/miticide), not
> on OD
>
> Since the 1980s, honeybees have been preyed on by a nasty little
> blood-sucking, disease-spreading mite known as the varroa destructor,
> and thus have to contend with the miticides beekeepers apply to hives
> (miticides, mind you, that have the tricky task of killing one bug that
> literally lives on another).
>
> 3. clothianidin - Wiktionary
> (https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/clothianidin), not on OD
> Doan knew his hives had tested positive for the neonicotinoid
> clothianidin, but the results had seemed dubious because clothianidin
> wasn't even registered for use in New York state.
>
> In questioning the EPA's conditional registration of the neonic
> clothianidin, the suit not only alleges that the agency has not met its
> own criteria for granting approval, but also challenges its approval
> process overall.
>
> 4. pollinator - Wiktionary (https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/pollinator),
> not in the OD English dictionaries
> Meanwhile, the Saving America's Pollinators Act, a congressional bill
> introduced in 2013 by Reps. John Conyers and Earl Blumenauer that would
> have taken neonics off the market until their safety was more
> definitively proven, never made it out of committee.
>
> This past May, President Obama unveiled a strategy to promote honeybee
> health that did not call for a restriction on insecticides, but did
> request that pollinator habitat be improved by restoring 7 million acres
> of land and water.
>
> Yet if honeybees are suffering, native pollinators are suffering too.
>
> 5. Dust Bowl - Wiktionary (https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Dust_Bowl),
> not in the OD English dictionaries; cites going back before the
> twentieth century Dust Bowl in the ADS archives
> Neonics may have come on the scene rapidly, but their adoption is due to
> forces that have been at play for decades, starting with the Dust Bowl,
> which cleared the Midwest of many small family farms and left massive
> tracts of land available to be bought up cheaply.
>
> 6. monocultural - Wiktionary
> (https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/monocultural) not on OD site; three uses
> in the ADS archives referring to culture, not horticulture
> Some of these monocultural crops rely on migratory beekeeping, a system
> in which hives are trucked in to pollinate a crop as it blooms and then
> hauled over to the next crop when the blooms are gone.
>
> 7. flupyradifurone - not in Wiktionary/OD
> They are also touting the benefits of flupyradifurone, a new systemic
> pesticide that's supposed to be safer for bees because it's even more
> toxic, the idea being that if it kills a bee on the spot, then that bee
> won't transport the toxin back to the hive.
>
> 8. colony collapse disorder/CCD - Wiktionary
> (https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/colony_collapse_disorder), not in the OD
> English dictionaries and capitalized in the English-Spanish dictionary
> (https://www.oxforddictionaries.com/translate/english-spanish/Colony-Collapse-Disorder?q=Colony+Collapse+Disorder),
> two cites in the ADS archives
>
> Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colony_collapse_disorder) seems
> to trace the term to November 2006, saying that it was earlier called
> the "mystery disease" and then the "disappearing disease". It also says
> that it's also known in the UK as "spontaneous hive collapse" and the
> "Mary Celeste syndrome".
>
> And it was long after he'd learned back in 2007 that he was not alone,
> that beekeepers all around the country, and even the world, were finding
> that their bees had not just died but had actually vanished, a
> phenomenon that was eventually named colony collapse disorder and
> heralded as proof of the fast-approaching End of Days by evangelicals
> and environmentalists alike. Theories abounded about what was causing CCD.

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