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

[Benjamin Barrett]

"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.

Benjamin Barrett
Formerly of Seattle, WA

Learn Ainu! https://sites.google.com/site/aynuitak1/home

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